


Waiting at the Gate

by Tawabids



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghostly Antics, Mental Health Issues, Protective Thorin, ghost story, mental health stigma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 01:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo catches Fili talking to himself. Bofur tells Bilbo a story about how Fili's late younger brother haunts Thorin's family. They say the dead Kili still whispers Fili's ear from the realm of death, protecting his brother from sickness and goblin arrows but leaving Fili's life plagued by rumours of madness. </p><p>And then Bilbo puts on the ring and learns that like all the scariest stories it is, of course, entirely true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. hearsay

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/5346.html?thread=11822818#t11822818) at the hobbit kinkmeme. 
> 
> This fic has been just as long in the writing as that prompt is old. It is in a lot of ways the big brother and inspiration for my other ghost-fic, _Skin-Gold_ , so similarities in theme, style and even some of the plot are not coincidental - but the two stories are not actually connected or set in the same universe, so nobody needs to read one to understand the other.

“Bilbo,” Bofur beckons with the spout of his long pipe. “Come over here. What are you looking so lost for?”

The blood rushes to Bilbo’s cheeks as he emerges from the shade. Ori, Nori and Bofur are splayed across the grass at the edge of the camp. The company made good time today and stopped early where the land was flat enough for camping. Ori is picking brambles off his socks and Nori seems to be napping. Bilbo had just wandered into the forest to admire the lichens hanging from the trees in sheets when he intruded on the oddest scene. But he doesn’t intend to indulge Bofur’s love of gossip.

“Nothing, nothing!” he tries to laugh. “What, er, what are you all talking about?”

“We’re remarking on the beautiful day and the fine company,” Bofur sighs, and then raises an eyebrow. “It’s as boring as dirt, really. Tell us what’s bothering you.”

“I’m not bothered,” Bilbo winces, flopping down on the grass beside Ori. He didn’t realise how sore his feet were until the weight is gone from them. “I just came across Fili, well— no, no, never mind.”

“Fili, eh?” Bofur inclines his head. “What about him?”

"Well, I'm sure... I’m sure I surprised him," Bilbo mutters, twisting the seeds off a grass stem and crumbling them between his fingers. “I forget you lot expect a loud racket wherever you go.”

Bofur grins at him. He says without a trace of concern, "You caught him talking to himself, didn't ya?"

"Aye?" Nori raises his head from his doze, sitting up against a log. "He what?" 

Bofur leans forward and lowers his voice. "Haven't you heard the story, Nori?"

"I thought I'd 'eard all the stories," Nori frowns. "Go on, give it up."

Ori squeaks, clapping his hand to his mouth. "Bofur, no! We aren't s'posed to talk 'bout it!"

"Yes, should we really…?" Bilbo makes a sour face.

"It's no slight on him or anyone else in the company," Bofur insists, pressing his hand to his heart. "Besides, it would be worse to let Bilbo think he's touched in the head."

"He's not touched in the head," Ori agrees. A little too quickly.

Bofur sweeps his gaze around the huddle – all four of them are hunched forward to listen now – and settles on Bilbo. "Now, this is just what I've heard, I don't know where the truth of it lies. The first part is fact as sure as rocks are rocks, of course. You see, once upon a time, Fili wasn't Thorin's only nephew."

"I don't think Thorin would want us to discuss this," Bilbo cuts in, but he says it rather weakly. He likes a good story as much as the next hobbit, and Bofur is an excellent storyteller.

"It's no secret," Bofur waves his pipe at Ori, who nods reluctantly. "Fili had a younger brother. A wee, dark-haired lad he was, with a smile like sunlight, as good-natured and cheeky a boy as any Dwarrowdam has borne. But times were hard, back then. There was never enough coal for the fire, never enough meat to keep the children plump and pink-cheeked. And one winter, a sickness fell across the village. Almost every child suffered it, and the young lad fell ill and never woke again. But," Bofur leans in even further, his voice a sinister rasp, "here's where it gets odd. They say that child was so full of life, so beloved by his kin, that _he wouldn't stay dead_. His laughter still echoed in the distant corners of the house. Toys moved without anyone touching them. He haunted his brother night and day, beckoning him to follow, calling for him to come and play just as he had when he was alive. And I think he's still whispering in Fili's ear – waiting for his brother to join him," Bofur's eyes widen, " _forever_." 

Bilbo shudders and feels a cool breeze ruffle through his hair like thin fingers. Nori suddenly jumps half a foot away from the log where he sat. "Bleed me dry! I felt like someone just touched my shoulder. Curse you, Bofur, I'll never sleep tonight."

Bofur cackles, leaning back a little to chew on the end of his pipe. "That's just what they say, of course."

"Oh, rot, none of that's the story I heard," Ori frowns, folding his arms. "I heard the ghost of Fili’s brother is guarding Thorin's family. To keep them safe from harm. Makes me feel better, actually, thinking Thorin and Fili have some kind of magic— ah!" he twitches and begins to wring his hands. "H-hello Fili!"

Bilbo and Nori twist around. Bofur shoves his pipe in his mouth and looks remarkably innocent. Fili is wandering over with his thumbs in his belt loops, smiling at them. "Hello, you lot," he says brightly. "What're you all huddled around for like plotting thieves?"

"Just telling stories of home," Bofur says smoothly, without taking his pipe from his mouth.

"Alright. I'm letting you know, Nori, Thorin says you're on first watch tonight."

Nori complains that he had been first just last week while Ori laughs at him. The tension is broken. But as Fili wanders off again, Bilbo realises his cheeks are still flushed red. He groans, "He knew we were talking about him. I'm sure he did. We should be ashamed."

"Nonsense," Bofur puffs out a string of smoke wisps. "I saw him a moment ago, he was right on the far side of the camp. How could he have heard?" 

But he doesn’t even sound like he is convincing himself. 

\---

Thorin bundled Fili in blankets, holding his twitching limbs still. Sweat had pooled in the hollow of Fili’s small neck and his gaze wavered on his uncle’s face, his dry lips mouthing questions he couldn’t find the strength to voice. His uncle carried him out and put him in Thorin’s own bed. The room the boys usually slept in belonged to death tonight. Nursing another child here would be begging for a second visit.

While Fili lay dying in the neighbouring room, his mother knelt by his brother’s bedside. She smoothed the fine hair off Kili’s brow, touched the small chin, wrapped the tiny fingers around her thumb. His skin was already cooling, falling like a stone from the deadly fever that had burned through the child’s body a few hours earlier. It had stolen his appetite first so that nothing Dis fed him would stay down, then robbed him of his mind and sent him mumbling into nightmares. Finally it took everything else and left him still and quiet. His mother found him when she woke from her vigil and her own terrible dreams.

“Dis,” Thorin said quietly from the threshold. “Will you not come with me? We won’t move Kili yet. Not until you’re ready.”

“No,” Dis breathed. “Not yet. Not my baby.”

She lay her head down on the pillow beside the child’s, closing her eyes against the tears. Thorin left her. In the hall he gripped the wall and bent his head, choking back a cry so as not to disturb his sister. His brother-in-law was dead only five winters past, and the child he had left in his wife’s belly had been like a blessing from the ashes, their last seed to nurture and protect. And now he was gone, and Thorin knew his elder brother was fading. The fever would take Fili too, before the night was out, and then what would be left? He and Dis were the fading remains of a lost dynasty and a shrivelled lineage. What future was there, without children, without the one treasure that no amount of gold could match? 

But in this Thorin was wrong. In the next room, Fili had begun to sleep soundly, rolling onto his side and tugging the blankets up to his chin. His fever was breaking. His breath grew less laboured. He reached out, half-dreaming, and brushed his hand over a head of soft hair. His brother lay curled in the curve behind his legs. A tiny hand gripped Fili’s and a voice whimpered to him.

“It’s alright,” Fili rasped. “I’m here.”

\---

The first time Bilbo sees the ghost is in the tunnel as they flee the goblins. Bilbo is standing behind the creeping creature from the pool, watching as the dwarves run past, only a few feet away but as unreachable as if it were a hundred miles. Bilbo counts them by habit. Six – ten – twelve – thirteen –

 _Thirteen?_ he thinks, though he’s got much worse things to panic about. _By all that’s green, who was that following Fili?_

Bilbo does get out of the tunnels, of course, and when he’s standing under the pines catching his breath he sees him again, the stranger with barely a beard, clapping Fili on the back as if he’s known him for years. Bilbo cannot help taking a couple of steps forward to stare, genuinely wondering if there’s been thirteen dwarves all along and he’s just missed the quiet one until now. Because he doesn’t look like he could have been some prisoner or companion of the goblins picked up during the dwarves’ escape – his clothes are as fine and decorous as any of the company. He even has a hood that matches Fili’s down to the exact shade of blue.

The stranger is grinning as he says to Fili, “Did you see that? I caught that arrow with my _face!_ ”

Bilbo’s eyebrows shoot up almost to his hairline. And before he’s thought further about it, the stranger turns and looks right at him. A wrinkle appears on his brow. His smile twists a little and he raises his hand in a half-aborted wave.

Bilbo raises his own hand to wave back and the stranger’s mouth drops open. He stumbles backwards, grabbing his friend’s arm. “He can see, Fili! He can see me!”

Fili’s gaze sweeps around, flitting across the spot where Bilbo stands without pausing for a moment. He hisses out the corner of his mouth. “Who?”

“Him! _Mr Baggins!_ ”

Fili frowns at him. “There’s no one there.” 

The stranger looks at Fili and swallows. “Oh no. You don’t think he’s… well… that our poor hobbit’s a ghost now?”

It’s Bilbo’s turn to back up this time. Breathing hard, he slips behind the nearest tree while the stranger is looking away. He touches his chest to feel his racing heart. It’s beating quite enthusiastically, thank you very much. Ghost is quite an exaggeration. But no one else in the company could see him either – in fact, they’re discussing him right now as if he wasn’t standing right here. Thorin seems to think he’s abandoned their quest, abandoned them, his friends. Well that won’t do.

It’s this ring, that’s what it is. The whole world changed when it slipped onto his finger. He seizes hold of it just as Thorin growls, “He is long gone!”

“No,” Bilbo says, stepping out from behind the tree. “He isn’t.”

As he tries to focus on explaining himself he flicks a glance towards Fili. The young dwarf stands alone at the edge of the group, his eyes narrowed at Bilbo. There is no dark-haired stranger. There is no thirteenth dwarf. 

And after that there are rather more important issues at hand for Bilbo to think on the matter any further.

\---

No one believed Fili. He tried to disbelieve it himself, tried to see that it was a remnant of the fever tricking his eyes and ears, but Kili followed him everywhere, crying pitifully when Fili ignored him. His bare feet made no sound as he ran after his brother on his short legs, still wearing the long nightgown in which he’d died, but his voice was just as it had been in life. “Fili! Don’t leave me! Wait for me!”

Fili stopped trying to tell the grown-ups the truth. It made Mama cry, and Thorin’s mouth turn down further and further. But when they weren’t around, he would gather his brother up just as he had in life and drag him off to hide in the attic, or put him on his shoulders, or tuck him close in bed. He could feel the little body, not quite warm, but solid and real all the same. Except that he wasn’t solid. He weighed almost nothing. His small hands could not lift so much as a linen sheet. And when Fili was sick of him, he would lock Kili out of the house only to turn around and find the white-clad, dark-haired, little figure standing right in front of him, sobbing that Fili had tried to get rid of him _again_.

“I’m not trying to get rid of you!” Fili snapped, aware that Thorin and Mama were only through the next wall. “I’m just – I want you to go away!”

And then of course Kili would cry and cry, and how could the grown-ups not hear that racket? But it was left to Fili to calm him and coddle him and promise not to leave him again.

As days turned into months, no one could miss the fact that Fili was still talking to his dead brother. He was not very good at hiding it, and he could not help staring at bare corners and touching the empty air even when the grown-ups were watching. Soon it became a game that everyone played along with. Who amoung them didn’t remember being small and talking to those invisible creatures that follow young children everywhere?

The game stopped hurting the grown-ups. Tears no longer shone in Dis’ eyes when Fili hissed, “Be quiet, Kili! I’m talking to Mama!”

“And what is Kili bothering you about?” she asked, cupping her hand around the back of her son’s head. “Hmm?”

“He’s bored with lessons,” Fili explained hesitantly. “He doesn’t want to learn any more Khuzdul today.”

“Oh, is that right?” Dis smiled. “Well, why don’t you tell ‘Kili’ that if his brother can recite the _ukùmâthof_ of the _kharub_ to me one more time, then his brother can go down to the river until dinner?”

“Kili can hear you,” Fili said in exasperation, and glanced at the empty patch of bench beside him. He nodded to no one and looked at his mother. “He says he’ll stay quiet until then.”

Even visitors played along. Balin bowed indulgently to the golden-haired boy who came running down the path to greet him. “Good afternoon, son of Dis.”

Fili remembered his manners and bowed in return. “At your service, Mr Balin. And Kili says so, too.”

“And where is your brother standing today?”

“He’s there!” Fili pointed at the grass beside the path and Balin bowed low at the weeds and spoke to them with great affection.

Young Bofur from the workshop in town brought Fili a toy lion, a sturdy thing made of painted tin. He tipped his head and clicked his tongue when Fili said he wanted two toys. “Now, lad, nobody needs more than their fair share.”

“It’s not for me,” Fili argued. “It’s for my brother.”

Bofur raised his eyebrows at Dis, who stood on a chair at the far end of the room, repairing a door hinge. She nodded at him, and Bofur smiled, reaching into his bag for a little red horse. “I suppose that’s fair enough.”

“Look, Mama!” Fili said later that day, as he trotted the horse and the lion in circles after each other. “Kili’s helping. He’s making his pony walk.”

“That’s funny,” said Dis, wiping grease from the door off on her apron. “It looks like Fili’s hand is the one holding the pony.”

“Yes, but he’s still practising,” Fili stammered. “He’s getting better. Look! Look!”

Dis had been staring out of the window watching Thorin come up the path. She glanced down to see the red horse lying on its side on the floor. Fili clapped his hands. “He pushed it over! I wasn’t even touching it! He did it, Mama! Did you miss it?”

“Oh, I think I did,” Dis sighed, trying not to let her exhaustion show in her voice. “But well done, Kili.” 

A tiny worm of discomfort wriggled in her gut, and she pushed it away into the place where she hid her grief and her despairs. 

Because it made her surviving son happy, Dis wished Kili goodnight when she was laying his brother down to sleep (though Kili’s bed had been sold some months earlier). When Fili said he’d only climbed onto the roof because Kili was sitting up there, she scolded her dead son as fiercely as her live one. She even set an extra place at mealtime, though she stopped short of putting food on the plate (“It doesn’t matter,” Fili said. “Kili doesn’t get hungry anymore.”) Sometimes such comments still wrenched at her throat, but Fili smiled at his invisible brother and showed no grief, so she kept the pain hidden. She couldn’t help herself. When she turned away she could still imagine that behind her stood two boys grinning up at her. Sometimes, in the corner of her eye she could almost see a dark-haired figure darting away down the corridor. And when she listened at Fili’s door at night, she swore she could hear two pairs of lungs hushing in and out in the darkness.

It helped her heal – or so she insisted to Thorin. And it wouldn’t last forever. “He will grow out of it. He’ll forget. He’ll get sick of playing childish games.” She didn’t tell her brother that a part of her didn’t want the game to end, for then she would finally lose her baby boy.

 

But Fili did not grow out of it.

At seventeen, he had begun to hide his conversations with his brother quite adeptly. But still people noticed, and people talked. Dis was not deaf to the gossip. She had called physicians on several occasions. She worried that the fever had permanently addled her son, that his hallucinations or his lies – wherever the truth lay – might grow worse. But Fili was reticent and well-behaved around the physicians, and they came away declaring him healthy and sane as any child.

Thorin did not believe that. One evening, he and Dis sat smoking in the main room of her house. They had checked that Fili was deep asleep, and spoke in low voices.

“Suppose it’s not inside his head?” Thorin asked. “Suppose there is something else at work, here?”

Dis packed fresh leaf into her pipe, shaking her head.

“We have to consider…” Thorin pressed his lips together, blowing a long plume of smoke out each nostril. “They say dark spirits can make homes inside troubled dwarves. They bring madness and death in the end.”

“They whispered such things about our grandfather,” Dis growled. “And you paid them no heed then, did you?”

“Thror’s sickness was of his own making,” Thorin countered. “And age had touched him. Fili is different,” he leaned forward, the shadows catching on his face as he turned away from the fire to look at his sister. “There are humans in the city who trade in driving such spirits out, Dis. We could at least have them meet Fili, see if they can detect…”

“Those charlatans are thieves who take coin from idiots!” Dis snarled, keeping her voice quiet as her fist clenched around the arm of her chair. “And their rituals are dangerous! People can even die of them!”

“Then will you let it go on?” Thorin whispered. “Will let your son speak to the dust motes like a lunatic and do nothing? Will you not at least visit these men on his behalf?”

“You don’t want him healed for his sake,” Dis shook her head. “You fear what people say about him. You fear that your only heir is growing into a madman whom no one will follow.”

“I fear for him first,” Thorin hissed back. “Always, for him first. I will write to the city tomorrow. And you will do as I say, sister. You will let me save him.”

Dis bared her teeth, stood up and walked out into the night, latching the door softly behind her. Thorin breathed in deep through his nose and slipped across the room to check on Fili. His nephew’s breath was slow and even in sleep.

 

The next day, Fili was quiet during breakfast. When Thorin left for the forge, he hurried after him, falling into step beside him.

“Thorin, may I walk with you?” he asked, having to take three steps for every two of his uncle’s.

“Are you avoiding your mother?” Thorin cocked his head at him with a smile. “Is there something you want to confess?”

“No, it isn’t that,” Fili took a shaky breath. “I just wanted to tell you. I haven’t seen… my brother for a long while, nor heard his voice. I think… I think perhaps he’s moved on.”

Thorin stopped and turned towards him. He studied his nephew’s face, which was open and hopeful. “But not two days ago, I saw you talking to him down on the river bank.”

“Out of habit,” Fili said quickly. “Actually, it’s been make-believe for months now. Maybe years,” he added. “It was silly of me, wasn’t it? I don’t know why I did it.”

There was a croak in his voice. Thorin put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Are you telling me the truth, Fili?”

“I am!” Fili cried. “I swear, uncle!”

“Alright, if you say so. Let’s talk about it with your mother when I get home, shall we?”

It was too much of a coincidence. Fili must have realised that drastic measures would soon be taken if he didn’t get better on his own. Thorin was not convinced his madness had completely passed, but he was gladdened by Fili’s self control. If there really was a dark spirit, or true madness, no dwarf could simply hide it any more than they could hide a broken arm or a thorn in their foot. Either Fili really had been faking his hallucinations all these years, or he was committed to driving them out by strength of will. Either way, Thorin would wait to take further action.

But how had Fili known? He had been fast asleep the night the spirit-healer had been discussed aloud. Had he sensed his mother’s mood the next morning? Had he heard their voices in his sleep? It was a strange turn of events, but Thorin didn’t dwell on it too long.

It was no stranger than anything else where Fili was concerned.


	2. tell all

After the eagles and after they have found their way to Beorn's house, the dwarves seem to look back at the Goblin tunnels and the burning pines with great mirth. Bilbo cannot believe that Ori's older brothers are already teasing him about being the first flying dwarf in history, while Dwalin and Gloin are talking about Thorin's battle as if it had been the clear victory for their king on all points. It’s as if they saw Thorin send Azog and his warg beaten and bloodied back into the mountains with no help at all from anyone else. Bilbo feels like he was the only one who had his eyes open the whole time. But he doesn’t mind at all that no one is thanking him or talking about his role in the skirmish. He doesn’t like thinking about the sound his sword made when it pierced the orc's chest, nor the smell of his own sweat and terror, not the feel of warg teeth snapping against his waistcoat. He doesn’t want to remember how close he and Thorin had come to ending their adventure on that burning slope.

He assumes this must be the topic at hand when Fili pulls him aside on their second evening. "A word, Mr Burglar? In private?"

"Of course," Bilbo said, instantly exhausted and full of dread. 

Fili leads into a quiet back-corridor of Beorn's house. He sweeps a conspiratorial glance around the clearly empty hallway, leans in and whispers. "Did you really see him?"

Bilbo draws his head back. "I... pardon?"

Fili's expression becomes distraught. "You didn't?"

"Saw who?" Bilbo winces. "Are we talking about Beorn as a bear?" their host's nighttime activities formed the main body of conversation all day, so he can’t think why Fili is acting so shifty about it.

The young dwarf shakes his head. He looks as though he is holding back tears. Given his courage on the quest so far and his vicious skill with a sword, tears from Fili are one of the oddest things that Bilbo has ever seen. He realises there is something of enormous importance weighing on the dwarf’s mind, and he has genuinely no idea what it is. Fili turns away, muttering, "Never mind, never mind."

"Please, do tell me!" Bilbo grabs for his hand before he can escape. "I'm sure it's just slipped my mind."

Fili's head hangs low and he peers at Bilbo through his braids. "It was just before you reappeared after we escaped the goblins. You were looking at someone. He... _I_ thought you were looking at him, anyway."

The pieces slide into place at last. "Oh, yes!" Bilbo says. "The fellow standing next to you. Blackish hair, no proper beard. I thought he was a figment of my imagination," he frowns to himself. "Who was he? Where did he go?"

He knows at once that he has said the right thing. Fili's eyes widen and his body goes rigid. He gapes and then grins wider than Bilbo had ever seen him smile. At last he glances down the corridor and laughs as if to himself. "Say that again."

"Say what?" Bilbo grumbles. He is unbearably curious now, but rather worried that he is the victim of some kind of sideways dwarvish joke. 

"Describe him."

Bilbo folds his arms. "I don't know. He was taller than you. I suppose he was a dwarf, but it was odd because he had no braids and as I said already, not much beard. Um. He had a hood the same colour as yours. He said something about 'your hobbit' being dead even when he was looking right at me, which didn't please me much."

Fili claps his hands over his mouth and turns away for a moment. He seems to be fighting to get himself under control. Bilbo is really, truly annoyed now. When Fili meets finally his eye he whispers, "But he's not here now?"

"No, of course he's not here now!" Bilbo snaps. "Frankly, I quite forgot about him, I reckoned I had just been looking at Ori all along and my eyes were muddled. I'd had a bad shock, you know. Now either you tell me what's going on this moment or I shall leave you alone to play your silly game by yourself."

Fili leans in, seizes hold of Bilbo's shoulders, looks him in the eye and hisses. "Bilbo, that dwarf is my brother."

"I didn't know you had a—” Bilbo's eyebrows shoot upward. "Y-you're d-dead brother?"

"Yes," Fili whispers. "You're the first person in almost seventy-two years to see his face – apart from me."

Bilbo feels his heart stammer and the blood drain from his face. Then a rush of humiliation sets his blood pumping. "Now, that is the last straw! If you and Bofur think I'm going to believe this nonsense, well… and here I was thinking we were practically friends, Fili!"

"It's not a trick. Bofur's got nothing to do with it," Fili lets go of Bilbo's arms and steps away. "I'll prove it to you. Close your eyes."

"I will not," Bilbo stomps his foot. "This is childish."

"Please, please, just do this one thing," Fili clasps his hands together and presses them to Bilbo's chest. There is a desperate, earnest fear in his eyes now that seems quite out of proportion with a failed practical joke. Bilbo wavers and pouts and finally sighs. He closes his eyes.

"Hold out your hand," Fili says.

Huffing, Bilbo stretches his palm up as if holding a tea-tray. After a moment, Fili takes hold of his hand in both of his own. His skin is oddly cool and smoother than his sword-calluses belie, but he grips Bilbo's fingers tightly. 

"Can you feel that?"

"Yes, yes, I'm waiting for your grand revelation," Bilbo mutters. Fili turns his hand over. A moment later, he pinches Bilbo’s skin very sharply.

Bilbo squeaks and opens his eyes, jerking his hand towards his chest. "What do you think you're—”

He stares. There is no one in front of him. Fili is standing several feet away down the corridor, his hands in his pockets, far out of Bilbo's reach. The doors at either end of the hall are closed tightly; there is no time for an assailant to have slipped away unnoticed.

"He says sorry," Fili tells him, his voice mirthful. "But he's also laughing, so I don't know if he means it."

Bilbo can’t even comprehend the jest. He stares at the empty air. He cannot find any words. After a long silence, Fili steps forward again. "Are you alright?"

Bilbo shakes his head slowly.

"Don't tell Thorin," Fili says quickly, squeezing Bilbo's shoulder. "He doesn't understand. Everyone knows the rumours but no one has ever believed me – I know Bofur told you around the campfire, Kili was eavesdropping—”

"Kili," Bilbo manages to croak. "His name is Kili?"

"Well, yes, that's no secret." 

"Where is he?" Bilbo asks. Fili points at the air right beside them. Bilbo reaches out and finds no resistance.

Fili shakes his head. "It's no good. It doesn't work unless you're not looking for him. That was the mistake I made all the time as a boy. If I told people where to look, they could never sense him because they expected nothing to be there. If you _know_ he’s there you can usually feel him, but if you believe he’s not there you never can. So you have to catch people by surprise. And then for some reason you saw him when we got out of the mountain, just that moment, maybe because you'd hit your head or you were just in such a panic from the goblins, or maybe it’s a hobbit thing…"

"No," Bilbo shakes his head. "I know what it was. I know how I can find him… Kili," he runs his tongue across the inside of his lip. 

This is absurd. This is impossible. People die and then they are dead, he has never once in his life considered otherwise. Hobbits don’t like things to be more complicated than that. But somebody really did pinch him. Bilbo has to know the truth, and he knows how to figure it out. "If I promise not to tell Thorin all this, do you swear not to tell anyone what I'm about to show you?"

"Alright," Fili says slowly, glancing at the empty air again, apparently for confirmation. 

Bilbo takes a breath, reaches into his pocket and slips on the ring.

And the thirteenth dwarf appears in front of him.

\--- 

About a month after the conversation about the spirit-healer, Thorin came home early and caught his nephew in the kitchen playing grid-stones by himself, moving the pieces on both sides of the board. Fili leapt up as Thorin cleared his throat, his face turning pale as chalk.

“What are you doing?” Thorin asked.

“Nothing.”

Thorin rumbled deep in his throat. “You told me this was over, Fili—”

“It is. It is, uncle!”

Thorin pinched the bridge of his nose. "Talk to me. I can help. There are people who can stop this."

"You mean spirit-healers," Fili shook his head.

"I won't let them hurt you. I'll stay by your side—”

"It's not me I'm scared for!" Fili threw himself into Thorin's arms, balling his fists in Thorin’s tunic. “I’ll do better. I'll be good. Don’t take me to the spirit-healer, uncle, please, please don’t! I’m not a lunatic – I’m not, I swear—”

Thorin pried his nephew’s hands from his chest and held him at arms’ length. “Why is this still happening?” he shook the boy, heedless of the pain flickering across his face. “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m not mad,” Fili shook his head, mumbling. “I’m not.”

“Tell me the truth!”

There was a clap like a stamping horse and a great clatter behind him. Thorin spun, holding Fili against his side in his alarm. The game board lay facedown on the far side the room, broken almost clean through, the stones scattered right across the kitchen floor. Thorin twisted on the spot, trying to figure out who could have come upon him unawares. But there was no one else in the house.

“It was an accident,” Fili gasped from where he was pinned under his uncle’s arm. “You kicked it.”

“Yes,” Thorin muttered, still staring at the broken wood. “Yes, I must have,” he turned back to his nephew, but his anger was drained. “I will have no more of this, alright?”

Fili nodded, wrapping his arms around his chest. “I promise.”

 

It didn’t stop. He hid it better than ever, but now and then Thorin stood at his door at night and heard him whispering to himself. Sometimes there was a look in his eyes during his sword lessons, as if distracted by something he wouldn’t voice. He had become remarkably adept at iglishmêk, yet his hands only seemed to make signs behind his mother’s back, or when he was turned away from his uncle. There were days his full attention was on Thorin, looking up at him in adoration. And there were days he was off in his own head, laughing to himself as he sat cleaning his boots on the veranda.

One day, Thorin found him at the forges asking Dwalin about his crest. He had not yet come of age but he was as tall as he was ever likely to get, and Thorin had decided to make him a motif for his clothes, something that could be worked into leather and that Dis could embroider into his shirts. He was an heir of Thror, after all, and his nobility should be visible.

Dwalin had offered to design the crest. Though he was a warrior first, he'd found late in life that sketching was preferable to idleness in these times of peace. But when Thorin went to the forge that day and leaned over to see what Dwalin was drawing, he noticed two designs etched in charcoal on the scraps of wood. They mirrored each other, one hard-edged and broad, the other thin and elusive.

Fili didn't see Thorin standing behind him. “I like this one, it’s wonderful,” he was saying, grinning at Dwalin. He pointed at the second design. “And my brother can have this one?”

Thorin stepped in without a word. Fili looked up at him, the smile vanishing in a split second. Dwalin cleared his throat. “It’s my fault, Thorin, I was indulging him.”

Thorin grabbed the scrap of wood with the second crest, snapped it over his knee and threw it into the smouldering forge. He could not speak. His rage was black and choking as smoke. He took hold of Fili by his collar, dragged him the whole walk home and locked him in the back room without a word. He listened to Fili beating the door with his fists, pleading for forgiveness, begging him not to tell anyone, and then screaming that he hated Thorin, he hated him more than anything in the world, _"He's real! He's real and you're wrong, you're wrong, you're WRONG!"_

Thorin left the house and sat outside with his head in his hands for a long, long time.

 

He feared the madness of his grandfather, but this was not an enemy he could root out and fight. It held his nephew hostage, and any blow Thorin struck would injure Fili first and foremost. So he stayed silent about the matter from that day forth. He didn't tell Dis about the second crest or the tantrum behind the locked door. But she knew something had happened. They didn't have to decide on a course of action – they both agreed, without ever saying anything aloud. 

And a part of Thorin wished there had never been a little seed left in Dis' belly, short-lived and ever-loved.

The two of them no longer spoke of her dead son. They no longer shared warm memories of a baby with brown eyes and a smile for anyone who looked at him. They took down the single, framed sketch of Kili that had hung on Dis’ wall since he’d died. They no longer visited Kili's grave, though Dis sent Dwalin with flowers or a small gift once a year, on his birthday. They did not even dare to joke about him in Fili’s presence. They sold the last of his clothes, gave away the cot where he’d nursed, and even took all the toys given to Fili after his death. They burned those that were too well loved to give away; a tattered, stuffed bear with its possum-fur coat worn down to the leather, the repaired grid-stones board, and the red tin horse from Bofur. Thorin watched the last flecks of paint blister and the metal corrode inside the licking flames, and wished with all his might for the memories to turn to ash and float away. If he and Dis both ignored the dead hard enough, if they both held still and silent as tombstones, perhaps the dead would finally be put to rest.

It didn’t work, but it buried the secret. Years passed. Fili came of age, travelled to and from Ered Luin without his mother and uncle, and returned full of stories and a thirst for new adventures. His beard began to come in thin and golden. The gossip died down. Dwarves nodded to Fili when he and Thorin passed in the street. Dwarrowdams visited Dis in her home, and more than one elbowed her and chuckled about their unmarried daughters. Gloin and his new wife came visiting and told Thorin he hoped his own son would grow up to be such a fine lad, and Thorin had to turn away and bite the inside of his cheek to keep from weeping in pride.

And one day, Thorin’s own ghosts began to alight on his shoulders and whisper in his ear: the ghost of his grandfather’s power, the ghost of the Lonely Mountain. She was waiting for a new king to return and breathe her back to life.

The ghosts of the mountain called him home, and in the end he could not help but answer.


	3. deeper water

Although he keeps his promise not to tell anyone about the unseen member of their company, Bilbo doesn’t get another chance to talk to Kili until quite a long time after Beorn’s house. He is aware of the ghost as one might be aware of a particularly polite and well-behaved boarder who is never seen yet leaves trace evidence of themselves in the form of unwashed mugs and shifted furniture. But Bilbo has no reason to put on the ring and therefore doesn’t come face to face with him again until they are deep in Mirkwood. It is long after he is separated from the dwarves and even after the spiders (there is no sign of Kili at all by then; Bilbo learns later that he became as lost in the dark as the rest of them, but of course unlike the dwarves and Bilbo, the spiders neither noticed nor dragged him off). In fact, it is in the palace of the wood-elves that they finally become fellow conspirators. 

Bilbo has been sneaking around the palace for more than two days, never daring to take off his ring and barely able to sleep, and his nerves are already beginning to fray. He jumps at the sound of any voice and presses himself against the walls every time he hears footsteps. So when he’s standing in what he thinks is an empty hallway and a voice in his ear whispers, "Boo!", he very nearly dies on the spot. As it is he spins around, trips on his own feet, reaches for his sword, finds it jammed in its sheath and falls over with a weak cry.

It is clearly a dwarf and not an elf. A moment later he recognises Fili's phantom little brother leaning over him with his hands on his hips and a wide grin on his face. As he had in Beorn’s house, Kili looks as solid and alive as anyone else, except that he is standing in the middle of the enemy corridor with no fear of being spotted. Bilbo takes his hand off his sword with a long exhalation and glances around. 

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Kili's grin grows, if possible, even wider. "It's alright, there's no one nearby, I checked."

"That wasn't funny," Bilbo scowls. He holds out his arm, but when Kili tries to help him up their hands pass through each other as if they were no more substantial than sun-cast images through stained glass.

"Are you doing that on purpose?" Bilbo grumbles, getting to his feet on his own and dusting himself off.

"I can, but I'm not," Kili says, wrinkling his nose. "I get sort of thinner the longer I'm away from Fili. Is he here? Are they all safe? I've been wandering around the forest for days until I followed some elves in. I was sure Fili couldn't be dead and this is the only place for miles that's got any food."

"They're here," Bilbo nods grimly. "But they're all behind locked doors. You've missed quite a lot, and you could have been some help against the spiders," he beckons for Kili for follow. "Come on, let's get you back to your brother."

"Against spiders?" Kili's eyes widen. "What good am I going to be against spiders?"

"Your brother said you could make yourself solid enough to block arrows," Bilbo frowns. "I'm sure you could wrestle a few spiders."

"That was one time," Kili jabs his forefinger at the centre of his forehead. "I got it right in here and it was brilliant. It would have hit Fili otherwise. But moving objects are hard to hold onto unless I'm really concentrating."

"Hmm. Well, you should work on that," Bilbo tells him.

"I don't tell you how to be a good burglar, don't tell me how to be a better ghost," Kili replies with a wink.

Bilbo almost makes a retort, but at that moment they come around the corner to see two elvish ladies walking towards them, whispering to each other and pointing ahead. They had heard Bilbo’s distant, one-sided murmur of conversation. Bilbo shoves his fist in his mouth and hugs the wall as they pass – Kili stands there with his hands behind his back and one eyebrow raised, wincing slightly as the ladies walk right through him and then extending his arm to usher Bilbo onwards.

Bilbo cannot help twitching as Kili begins to talk again without any attempt to lower his voice. "It just occurred to me that when there's other people about, I can say whatever I want to you and you can't argue back. You don't even know how to swear at me in _iglishmêk_."

Bilbo doesn’t know what _iglishmêk_ is, but knows how they make rude gestures in the Shire and does so vigorously, fuming as he stomps onwards. They reach Fili's cell soon enough. Bilbo blinks and Kili is suddenly standing on the inside of the door. Within moments, both brothers are slapping each other on the back and making what is surely enough noise to rouse the guards. Bilbo’s presence is forgotten.

\---

It is a lonely time in Mirkwood, playing the role of the eternal thief, but Bilbo isn’t always alone. He sleeps in a voluminous spice pantry one night and wakes the next morning – evening, afternoon, it’s hard to tell inside the palace – to find Kili lying over his legs, his chin propped up on one hand while he chases a wheevil in circles with a bay leaf. He is almost weightless, but definitively present – his body is a feeling against Bilbo’s skin rather than a sensation of weight. As cool as fresh sheets from a cupboard, it is a kind of pull instead of a push, like the suction of sea anemones. Bilbo is trying to make sense of this when it occurs to him that the ghost is using him as a pillow and his irritation returns.

“You—” Bilbo sits up a little and kicks him. “Get off.”

“Oh, sorry,” Kili raises himself and stretches his arms and neck, his edges blurring as Bilbo hears the clicking of joints that do not and cannot exist. Bilbo wonders how much control he has over his invisible body and clothes, whether he could change his colour or remove his head if he wanted. “I forgot you’d know I was here.”

“Do you lie on people a lot when they don’t know about it?” 

“Most of the time. Especially the soft ones like Ori,” Kili shrugs and scratches a spot on his chin. It must be a tic, Bilbo decides, all the little habits and mannerisms he has picked up from people who actually have skin to get itchy. “How do you enjoy being invisible all day?”

“It’s horrid,” Bilbo sniffs.

Kili grins, but there is something raw in it. “At least you can take it off.” 

“Fair call,” Bilbo narrows his eyes at the ghost. “Do you… actually, never mind, that’s probably very rude of me.”

“No, go on. Seventy years without someone new to talk to, you think I care about rude?”

Bilbo winces and sits up properly against the shelves of the pantry. “Do you remember, well… dying?”

Kili’s mouth gets pinched on one side and he seems to think about it for long enough that Bilbo wonders if he should ask something else instead. Finally he says, “I remember being sick. I was very small back then, but it seemed awfully uncomfortable. I was glad when it stopped… hmm…” he lifts his hands, eying his splayed fingers, “…hurting.”

“Did you understand?” Bilbo asks quietly. “Did you know what had happened?”

“Not at first,” Kili drops his hands and tucks his folded legs in closer. “I never saw my body. Moving about was difficult – I kept sort of hopping from place to place, like you’ve seen me do. I couldn’t control it then, I’d only think of a place and suddenly I’d be there, even if I didn’t want to be. And it seemed everyone was being cruel, refusing to talk to me, so I thought I’d just done something bad and was being punished.”

He pauses and Bilbo leans forward to rest his chin on his knees. The air smells of old wood and spices, every type imaginable and plenty more he’s never imagined in his life. Bilbo says, “I think I’d go mad. If I had to stay secret like this, always wearing the ring forever.”

“It wasn’t so bad while Fili was young,” Kili explains. Bilbo has noticed that he always references time and geography like this – ‘When Fili was young, when Fili was living in Ered Luin, when Fili came of age’, and never ‘When _I_ was young,’ or ‘when _we_ went to Ered Luin’. He huffs a laugh. “Everyone pretended I was still there, but I could only talk to them through my brother. A bit like living in a house full of people who speak another language – or who were all deaf-blind except for Fili!”

Bilbo chuckles with him, but it is not very funny to think about. Bilbo prompts, “Do you think they believed in you?”

Kili’s smile wilts. He flicks the bay-leaf along the floor. “No. Not really. I felt like a spy,” he slumps a little. “And soon enough they wanted the game to stop. They didn’t just disbelieve: they began to… to _un_ -believe.”

“Deny,” Bilbo supplies automatically. He feels ill, remembering his own parents and their endless dedication to him, their only child. How much it would have hurt, to have them renounce him and push him away.

“No,” Kili says bitterly. “At least then they would have admitted what I used to be,” he presses his mouth to his knees, puffing up his cheeks and letting out a long breath into the coarse cloth of his trousers – again, Bilbo has to remind himself that there is no real air being moved, no real warmth of breath or blood. Kili stares at the bottom shelf of the spice-rack. “There were days even I began to doubt that I had ever existed.”

Bilbo feels a hook tug at the back of his throat and he swallows. 

“Have you ever seen others?” Bilbo asks at last, mostly to break the silence. “Other dead people?”

“Never,” Kili’s mouth twists as if trying to smile and not quite remembering how. “Perhaps they’re all around us but even I can’t see them. Or perhaps it’s just me who’s gone odd. Like a stone that decided to get up and walk about.”

Bilbo forgets all his annoyance with Kili. He likes thinking about all this – he’s always liked any strange, benevolent phenomena that don’t seem to follow the natural order of the world. He likes plants that flower out of season and animals born a funny colour and lunar eclipses. The world is full of rules, complicated and not always predictable, but regular all the same. Bilbo wants to know what causes _exceptions_. And he would like to make Kili feels better.

“Things like that don’t just happen,” he says. “Someone has a reason for keeping you here – a good reason, I expect. You don’t seem like you’d be much help in the ‘bad reason’ department.”

Kili smiles at him. “I’m glad you think so, Mr Baggins.”

“And really,” Bilbo says. “If there was ever going to be a way to find out the truth, it was going to be on this thrice-cursed quest.”

\---

When he shuts the last barrel up and puts the ring on, he finds Kili standing right beside him and startles. He mutters a dwarven swear word he’s learned from Bofur. 

“Have you been here the whole time?” 

“I’ve been keeping watch!” Kili protests. 

“Keeping watch? How were you going to warn me? I can’t see or hear you without my ring.” 

“I’d have pinched you. But anyway, the guards are coming. Haven’t you forgotten something?”

Bilbo sees at once what he means, and mutters an even worse curse quite a bit louder. He tries to think as fast as he can, but what can he do? He can’t shut himself in a barrel without a second pair of hands, and certainly not now as the elves come around the corner, laughing to each other about. 

“I guess we’re going into the river,” Bilbo whispers to Kili, pointing at the trapdoor as the elves heave it open. “We’ll hang on tight and maybe we won’t be battered to pieces.”

Kili’s eyes go very wide. “I can’t! I… I can’t swim.”

Bilbo shoots him a look of such disdain it would have withered even Thorin’s pride. “Is that a joke? You can’t _drown_.”

“I don’t like water,” Kili glances at the great opening in the floor of the cellar, through which the noise of the river roars up and spray rises in a fine mist. He swallows and gives a little shudder. “I go through it like it was air, but then it presses me on all sides and I don’t know where the sky is. I don’t feel up-and-down like you living folks do, not even when I’m standing on the solid earth. And I can’t hang onto the barrels if they’re moving too fast. Bilbo, I mean it! If I go into that river, I may never get out again.”

“You have to,” Bilbo reaches out and grips the ghost’s arm, feeling a strange force beneath his fingers, one that is neither cold nor hot but definitely solid. “There’s no other way to follow us.”

The last few barrels are being tipped into the trapdoors. Bilbo takes a breath and stands up. He tries to pull Kili with him, but the arm that seemed real a moment ago now slips through his fingers. 

“We have to go,” Bilbo hisses. He backs towards the door. There are only two barrels left. If Bilbo remembers correctly, one of them holds Thorin’s only living nephew inside of it. 

“I can’t,” Kili shakes his head, standing and following a couple of steps behind him.

“Now, Kili!” Bilbo mouths, terrified that the elves’ sharp ears will hear. The last barrel is going over the edge. He can’t wait a moment longer. He throws himself after it and catches hold of its lip as they fall down together, hitting the water with a great smack that drives the air out of his lungs. He heaves for breath that won’t come as freezing water sets his nerves on fire and the darkness rushes in around him. 

The last thing he sees before the tunnel closes over him is a square of glowing candlelight, and Kili standing inside it, screaming, “Bilbo! Fili!” at the top of his lungs. 

\---

Fili comes out of his barrel practically grinning, and the first thing he says with a laugh is, “Mr Baggins, I will never recommend your holiday ideas to anyone,” as he slaps Bilbo on the back. But the second thing he says while looking around, “Where’s Kili?”

When Bilbo tells him the story, the grin falls from his face and his arms hang at his sides. He shakes his head as if he is sure Bilbo is lying. “But how far are we from the palace?”

“I haven’t been counting inns along the way!” Bilbo grumbles, but he looked at plenty of maps in the elf-king’s chambers (maps are something he always takes note of even when it’s just for his own pleasure). “At least thirty or forty miles, I suppose.” (He suspects it is a lot more.) “We must get the others out of the barrels, Fili, they’re suffocating in there.”

Fili’s face gives a curious spasm, but he suppresses whatever else he’s feeling and helps Bilbo retrieve the rest of the dwarves. Many of them are groaning or completely senseless and there is nothing to do but make them comfortable and wait for them to recover. It is not long before Fili tugs Bilbo’s sleeve, herding him away from Thorin and Dwalin, who are sitting up with wails and curses.

“How could you leave him?” he hisses. 

“I didn’t have a choice!” Bilbo thrusts his arm out towards the rest of the company. “He’s a ghost for goodness’ sake! Did you expect me to abandon this lot to look after a lad who can’t be harmed?”

“Not by sword or fire, but we don’t know…” Fili shakes his head, digging his hands into his sodden, tangled hair. 

“What is it?” Bilbo whispers. “What are you afraid of?”

“He’s tried to travel away,” Fili grits his teeth, pacing on the spot. “You think he enjoys seeing me every moment, day-in, day-out, never speaking to another soul, never even able to sleep to escape me? He’s gone off alone plenty of times, but he gets a few miles down the road and it’s like smoke rising from a chimney – he says he can feel himself getting faint, losing his hold on the world. So he always comes back. He’s never dared go further!” he spins back to face Bilbo. “Suppose I got too far away and now he’s gone, Bilbo, truly gone, truly dead! And I didn’t even say anything to him as you were closing up that stinking barrel—”

“Now, calm down,” Bilbo raises his hands. He can feel the contagion of panic knotting his guts. “It can’t be that easy to lose a whole person. He’ll find us. You wait and see.”

Fili nods without conviction, and shortly Thorin calls them from along the riverbank to demand that they come back and help him stand up. They are going to visit the Lake-Men, and they will have to keep their wits focused if they want to get food and warm beds for tonight. The ghost will have to sort out his own problems, Bilbo reckons. 

But he glances at Fili’s morose face and knows that Kili won’t be far from mind.


	4. red flare

For just over two pleasant weeks they remain in Lake-Town. Bilbo is sick for most of it and the rest of the dwarves are eating, drinking or sleeping. All except for Thorin of course, who is brooding, and Fili, who looks like he’s brooding but Bilbo knows is actually worrying. The young dwarf wanders out of Lake-Town every day, walking back and forth along the fishermen’s paths and the stony shores, claiming he needs the fresh air. Bilbo begins to worry in turn each day he sees Fili come back with his frown deeper than ever and his eyes locked on the west, back towards Mirkwood. Fili has been hiding his best friend for seventy years – longer than Bilbo has been _alive_! – and now he cannot speak his fears aloud nor show any sign of mourning. In his own way, the real Fili is as invisible and secret as Bilbo was in the Elf-King’s palace.

Bilbo mostly recovers from his illness by the end of the fortnight and he finally gets Fili alone one evening. They sit on a rickety balcony out the back of the house the Lake-Men have put them up in. There is a dusky mist lazing on the water below, mixing with the smoke of the town’s chimneys. When Bilbo looks out towards Erebor, a barely-visible spur of black against the starry sky, he feels as if the balcony is the prow of a ship sailing over a cloud.

“You haven’t given up, have you?” he asks Fili. “It’s a long walk from the forest. He could have gotten lost. And it’s not as if he’s going to get hungry or attacked by bears.”

Fili picks at a splinter in the rotten railing. He lets out a long breath through his nose. “This seems so incomplete. I thought I would know,” he says quietly. “If he… moved on. I thought I would feel something.”

“Then what are tying yourself in knots about?” Bilbo presses. “If that were the case, you would know.”

\---

The holiday is over. Fili’s mood has spread to the rest of the company now as they ride into the shadow of the mountain. The bare hills are strangely intangible, with no smell of green, growing things and no sound but for the wind. They are all coloured so much the same, shadowless beneath the grey sky, that it is hard to judge distances. A rise looks only a few yards off and then turns out to be a high peak some miles in the distance; slopes wait unseen until the ground drops away beneath them. Over two or three days travel the land around Erebor inclines so slowly that Bilbo doesn’t realise how high they’ve climbed until he looks back and sees the plains spread out beneath them, the river winding through the middle of the view in reflection of the unyielding clouds. 

They reach the valley of Dale and make their way along the west arm. Everybody keeps their voices lowered even though they would see a threat long before it was in hearing range. Early snow lies scattered about, speckled brown from the dust that the wind whips up constantly. They’re stopped for lunch in the lee of a steep crag when Fili suddenly stands and points.

“Is there someone up there?”

Heads rise up and hands go to axes and swords. Balin gets up to stand beside Fili and follow his finger. “Where, laddie?”

“There – it looks like there’s someone’s sitting on that spur, right up there on the ridge.”

Balin shakes his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“Ori, do you see them?” Fili says, rolling his eyes in exasperation. He pulls Ori in close so he can look directly down the length of Fili’s arm. “Just to the right and above that runnel of snow, the one that looks like an arrowhead.”

Ori squints for a few seconds, keen to endorse anything Fili says, but at last he shrugs. “I think it’s just a bit of rock, Fili.”

“It’s not! You’ve been staring at your books too long. There’s definitely a short man or a tall dwarf sitting—” 

His voice cuts out. He makes a choking noise deep in his throat and looks at Bilbo, and then without another word he bolts, his boots kicking up gravel as he sprints away up the ridge.

“Fili!” Thorin bellows. 

Dwalin leaps up. “What’s bitten him?” 

“What does he think he’s doing?”

Bilbo swallows. He doesn’t know whether he wants it to be true or not, with everyone watching and Fili suddenly so careless. He looks around at the confusion on the dwarves’ faces. Dwalin and Thorin are making as if to follow Fili, but Bilbo jumps up and puts his hand on Thorin’s arm.

“I’ll go get him,” he says, as brightly as he can. “Stay here. I’ll go.”

He turns and hurries over the sharp stones, the scree crumbling under his feet. As he gets closer to the spur of rock he sees Fili standing in the saddle below it, rolling on the ground like a man trying to shake something off. His laughter bubbles through the air. Bilbo glances back at the company. Half of them have got up and are jogging closer to see. With a sigh, Bilbo slips his hand into his pocket and puts on the ring.

And there they are, two brothers tussling on the ground in heedless celebration. Kili’s voice is jabbering in between gasps of laughters, “You bloody – you fool! I didn’t know where – I’ve been sitting on that rock staring at the valley for a _week_ –”

“We were in Esgaroth. I’ve been searching every day!” Fili tugs him into a headlock with both arms and rocks him from side to side, pressing his chin into the crown of Kili’s hair. His smile is as wide as his face. “Every day!”

Bilbo doesn’t want to ruin it. But the others are coming. He can hear their voices. He puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles sharply. Fili looks up. His smile wilts. Bilbo turns to see Thorin standing right behind him, and his expression is dark as a thunderstorm.

\---

Thorin prefers anger to confusion. In a tight situation it is usually the safest option and very easy to summon when he needs it. Right now he has not even made an effort as he feels it building in his gut.

He watches Fili shove himself to his feet. A few small stones clatter away down the slope. There is guilt on his face, and something that looks like exhaustion – but they’re all tired, and on edge. There are no excuses for this behaviour.

“What are you playing at?” Thorin growls, but he already knows, he _knows_. Not now, not after all these years! So close to this most difficult and dangerous task, his dwarves must have faith in him and in each other. A madman in their midst will ruin everything. A madman who is Thorin’s own kin and their future leader – unthinkable, _unacceptable_. 

He takes a step towards Fili, and out of the thin air Bilbo emerges. He is so good at his disappearing act these days that Thorin had not even noticed him gone. He moves to shoulder past the hobbit but Bilbo steps in front of him, putting both his hands on Thorin’s chest.

“Wait, wait,” he is panting slightly from chasing Fili up the slope. “Thorin, there’s something you have to know.”

“I have more important matters right now, Mr Baggins,” Thorin snaps, his eyes locked on Fili’s face, which is now wracked with remorse. So he should be! He knows better!

“Listen to me,” Bilbo snarls. He has never spoken to Thorin so sharply, not in all the months they’ve travelled together. Thorin stops and stares down at him, aware that the entire company is looking between them and Fili. Bilbo’s brow is furrowed and he says very firmly, “Give me your hand.”

“What?” Thorin frowns. Bilbo grabs him by the wrist and pries his fingers open, his nostrils flaring. One of his small hands are cradled around something, and in a moment he has stretched out Thorin’s littlest finger and he is holding his magic ring over the very tip – Thorin has not actually laid eyes on it until now, and the gold glints up at him like water in a desert.

“Don’t be frightened,” Bilbo says. Thorin almost snorts at the very idea, and then he slides on the ring and the world changes.

He tugs out of Bilbo’s grip and takes a couple of stumbling steps forward, gaping around him at the silvered, shivering landscape. It flows at its edges as if viewed through shallow water. And then his eyes turn at last to Fili.

Fili stands twenty feet away and is looking through him and past him, his mouth half-open. 

He is not alone.

_He is not alone._

A young dwarf stands beside him, the fingers of one hand knotted tight with Fili’s. He is tall, dark-haired and grim-faced as if facing down a terrible foe. He has Dis’ mouth. It turns down at the edges in just the same way. His eyes are brown, like the babe that Thorin buried with his own hands. 

Thorin walks towards them, stumbling on the shifting gravel. The young dwarf’s startles and he steps away from Fili, letting go of his brother’s hand. Thorin reaches him and his eyes are not wide enough to drink in the sight of him. Sight is not enough to believe in; he raises his hands and takes hold of the impossible dwarf by the shoulders. A gasp is torn from his throat. He feels _real_.

The glare transforms into a swift, beaming smile. “You see me!”

“I see you,” Thorin echoes. He sweeps his gaze over the dwarf again from toes to brow. “Kili.”

“Yes,” Kili says, laughing through the word. “Yes, I’m Kili.”

“This cannot be.”

Thorin’s hands slide over him to hold his face, to be sure he can’t get away, and Kili’s grin grows even wider as he grips Thorin’s arm. His skin is not warm, but then again it is a cold day. His gaze is lucid and lively, not that of a faded phantom or a sinister wraith sent by some dark power. 

Without warning Kili throws himself forward, his arms encircling Thorin’s neck, as rough and undeniable an embrace as Dwalin or Dis would have given him if they had not seen Thorin for a very long time.

A very, very long time. 

\---

Bilbo stands with Bofur at the front of the company. He picks at a thread on his sleeve and chews the inside of his cheek. There are several quiet conversations starting up behind him, arguing about what’s going on and whether something should be done about it. It is an odd scene, and not even a very interesting one, after all. To all their eyes, Fili is simply standing by himself a little way away, smiling curiously.

At last, Thorin reappears and there is a small cheer from the rest of the dwarves which soon dies down. Thorin does not look well. He grabs for Fili’s arm and then sits down abruptly, his head bent. His fingers massage his temples as if he was in great pain. Fili crouches beside him, speaking too quietly for Bilbo to make out the words. It’s too much for the rest of them – Bofur twitches and that releases the flood, all of them piling forward to cluster around Thorin.

“What happened?”

“Why’d you put on that ring?”

“Are you ill? Did the magic sicken you, laddie?”

“I never trusted it—”

“Give him some air!”

Fili raises his hand to them. “He’s quite well, Oin, leave him be!”

“I’m alright,” Thorin raises his head. He clears his throat. “I’m not ill,” he sucks in a long breath and then lets it out slowly, turning to his nephew.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I’m so sorry, Fili,” and then his gaze turns to the empty air between Oin and Dori. “And you… you deserve my contrition more than anyone.”

Fili tips his head. After a moment of silence, he says, “No, he says Fili deserves it the most after all he’s put up with,” and then he flinches as if to ward off a blow, and chuckling speaks to the empty air. “Well I do!”

\---

It is some time before the dwarves believe what they are being told, even when it is Thorin doing the telling. When they finally begin to accept it, there is an atmosphere of vigilant concern which Bilbo sympathises with. It is not comforting to know you might constantly be watched, that no conversation might be as private as you thought. Soon several of the dwarves band together and ask Fili if he could communicate to Kili their welcome and also their request, with the utmost respect for all that he’s been through, “could you please ask Kili to stick very close to you, so that we knew where he is at all times?”

“There’s no need to ask me,” Fili says, with the weary patience of someone forced to relive years of childhood misunderstandings and skepticism. “He’s right here.”

“Well, that’s our point,” Bofur says brightly. “How’re we supposed to know we’re talking to him unless we know he’ll be where you are?”

Fili pauses and then rolls his eyes. Dori says sharply, “Here now, I don’t think we’re being unreasonable—”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t for you,” Fili says quickly. Bilbo can hear the frustration in his voice. “Kili says he’ll do his best.”

They pitch camp several times as they get closer and closer to the secret door. Thorin begins to ask Bilbo every day if he might borrow the ring for a spell, so that he can learn all he can about Kili from his nephew’s own mouth. If it were anyone else, Bilbo would have said no, but he cannot refuse Thorin. Not because he recognises Thorin’s authority, but because Thorin is fast becoming his dearest friend in the company, and besides – he is Kili’s closest kin apart from his brother. Who is Bilbo to deny him?

The rest of the company is exploring the mountainside waiting for Bilbo to figure out how they are going to get through the hidden door, but Thorin does not join them. One night after dinner on the doorstep he even spends hours talking to Kili in a grassy nook away from the main camp. Fili sits with Bilbo by the fire, joining in stories with Bofur and Dwalin while he waits for his brother and uncle to return. His smile is bright and he’s louder and more talkative than Bilbo has ever seen him. He no longer has to watch his tongue at every moment, nor keep one ear open to divide his attention between two worlds. 

Bilbo thinks this must but what Fili would have been like, what he _should_ have been like, had he not brushed death all those years ago and come away carrying a piece of it. Bilbo prefers this Fili, and feels guilty for it. There had always been something odd about the prince, something that kept a person off balance when they spoke to him, but once Bilbo understood what it was he no longer feared it. He befriended it. He made allowances for it. He was happy to take Fili’s good company and his invisible companion as part and parcel, two sides of a coin. Bilbo can’t let himself slide back into suspicion and irritation just because he does not have to deal with Kili as often now – it would not be fair. It _isn’t_ fair to blame either of them.

He chastises himself for wishing Fili could just be happy and ordinary like this all the time. Bilbo can see that Fili's brother never really leaves him, and that it actually seems to take Fili some effort to keep his spirits up. His eyes still often towards the place where Thorin and Kili are sitting. He is at first quiet and then snappish when the other dwarves press him with questions about death, about other ghosts, about whether he knows what it’s like on the _other side_. 

For a while, when the revelation was fresh, he must have felt free. At last able to fling open the doors on a lifetime of secrecy and self-doubt. But they _cannot_ know his brother as he does; they will never know him. There is only one magic ring and none of them have asked for it, and Bilbo is not sure he would give it to them if they did. Kili is still alone in a world of deaf-blind strangers and Fili is still, in the hearts of the people around him, a madman.

But Thorin – yes, Thorin might come the closest to crossing over.


	5. ghosts in the mountain

The secret door is opened at last, and Bilbo’s time has come. 

His heart is racing and his skin feels numb and prickly as if he'd walked from a blizzard into a blazing oven. Just inside the shadows of the tunnel, with the light still within reach, he puts on the ring and looks back at the clustered faces of his friends, all jostling each other to stare through the place where he disappeared. Only Kili can make eye contact with him, so only Kili sees the fear in his face. Kili breaks away from the group and steps into the tunnel to join Bilbo. They move a few yards away from the dwarves, just out of earshot. Fili's eyes follow his brother's path but he doesn't call him back.

"What is it?" Kili asks. "Are you ready?"

"Will you come with me?" Bilbo mumbles, and hastens to add. "Just a little way. Just until we smell brimstone."

There's a half-moment of hesitation that makes Bilbo gulp, and then, "Alright," Kili agrees. "I'll come as far as I can. You know I can't hurt a dragon though, don't you?"

"I wouldn't ask it of you," Bilbo laughs shakily.

They traipse down, down into the darkness. Bilbo's footsteps sound very lonely, and he can't see Kili in this blackness. He tells himself not to be stupid, because of course the ghost is still there, but as time goes on his eyes begin to see white sparks and swirls in their deprivation and he becomes more and more convinced that Kili has left him. Bilbo's mind begins to spasm. What is he doing? Even the dead have fled! He will never make it back to the sunlight, to the stars and the smell of grass on the doorstep. He can smell something now, quite unlike brimstone: a hot and pressing animal smell, not dirty but not pleasant at all. A smell like heated copper and tarnished silver and fresh-turned compost. Soon he becomes aware of a real, ruddy light against the walls of the tunnel. His hands begin to shake. He's alone, completely alone, and the dwarves will never come after him to find his body. Curse this mad, hopeless quest, what was he getting himself into? What was he—

"Bilbo," Kili says.

Bilbo turns and finds the ghost standing right behind him. He's visible as nothing more than a very faint, reddish outline in the distant glow, a shape like an aura in the darkness. 

"I can't go further," Kili whispers. "I'm sorry."

"Of course. It's fine," Bilbo breathes, terrified to speak any louder.

"No – it's not – well , I suppose it is cowardice," Kili's voice is quieter than Bilbo has ever heard it. There has never been any need for the ghost to whisper. "This isn't my first time into the mountain."

Bilbo doesn't respond aloud, but the question must be clear in the tenseness of his shoulders. Kili stumbles to explain, "When I first got here and I couldn't find anyone, I thought perhaps you and the others were already inside. I thought I should go in and scout around. If you were still on your way I might even have brought back something useful to tell you. But I went in the front gate and… and… I don't think you will see them even with the ring on, they're so old and faded, so worn down—"

"See who?" Bilbo mouths, not sure if he's even making any noise at all now.

Kili shakes his head. "The mountain is full of ghosts, Bilbo. All the dwarves who died in Erebor by Smaug's fire – they're still here. The mountain keeps them like insects in resin. Or... or like cobwebs after the spider is dead, collecting dust, shapeless now, less substantial than moonlight through a crack in the shutters. I was terrified of them when I arrived, but they were drawn to me, they pushed me and tugged me. I heard their voices at last. They were warning me to go away. They were warning me to leave the mountain. They said Smaug can smell ghosts."

Bilbo feels his breath catch in his throat. He is sure Kili isn’t really speaking now, that what he is saying is being passed to Bilbo by the power of thought alone, but the words still ring clear. 

"They said that where Smaug walks, where his eye gazes, ghosts melt away like mushrooms left in the field. He's been cleaning out the mountain hall by hall. He won't even suffer the memories of the dwarves to remain here."

Bilbo chokes at the thought of it, the strength of self-possession such a beast must have to even wipe away the ghosts of a people. And his mind shreds itself with with the thought that perhaps the magic ring will not work on dragon eyes. If Smaug can find ghosts, he can surely find anything, even invisble burglars. 

There is nowhere to go but forward. Bilbo feels like his insides have turned into soup, but becomes numb, the fear is so great. After a moment he says, "You don't have to stay, then. Go back to Fili. I'll come running up after you soon enough, I expect!"

"I'll wait until you're out of sight," Kili promises. His shape moves and Bilbo can just feel the insubstantial fingers against his shoulder. "Good luck, Bilbo."

Before he can second guess himself, Bilbo turns away and walks towards the red light of the dragon.

\---

Smaug tears open the mountain trying to find them, and then vanishes. After hours of fear and silence Bilbo and the dwarves step carefully into his treasure hoard, waiting for the inevitable heat and roar and death. But the dragon is gone and he does not return.

A raven tells them all that has happened; Smaug’s death, the ruin of Laketown; the approach of the elven host. They build a wall before the front gate and huddle behind it, pretending to be lords of Erebor. Bilbo isn’t sure who they think they’re fooling.

Thorin asks him for the ring every day now, so he can speak with his nephew, and takes longer and longer to return it. Even when he isn’t wearing it he often asks the empty air if Kili is nearby, and grows grim and irritable if he gets no response in the form of an invisible tug on his hand or tap on his shoulder.

Fili’s smile wavers a little. He is spending more time with Bofur and Bilbo, as if he doesn’t know what to do with himself without a constant companion. One day he and Bilbo go searching for a suit of armour in the hoard, in case it comes to a battle. Fili chooses an ensemble of fine, thin steel with gold filigree stamping Erebor’s herald upon the breast. On the inside is an engraving in an alphabet that is foreign to Bilbo. Fili reads it to him; “A gift from Thror, king eternal, to his grandson and heir, Thorin son of Thrain, on the first day of his adulthood. Our children are our greatest inheritance.”

“He must have been very fond of Thorin,” Bilbo says.

“That’s what they say,” Fili hums in agreement.

Bilbo helps him try on the armour. It fits perfectly. Fili takes it off again and holds the breastplate in front of him, studying his reflection in it for some time. 

\---

"Bilbo," Thorin says. His voice fills the hallway and makes Bilbo jump. He's holding a torch aloft, though the lamps of Erebor have been filled and lit since they arrived and the light-vents opened to let mirrored sunshine down into the outermost caverns. Thorin is covered in fresh smears of dust, and there are shadows under his eyes. Bilbo realises he has not seen the dwarf king for what seems like a day or two. He was not at breakfast this morning nor at the singing of the dwarves this evening (Bofur and Oin had fixed and tuned several flutes and horns to accompany them). 

"Where have you been, Thorin?" Bilbo asks, trotting closer. "You look a mess."

"Come with me," Thorin rumbles, and turns away without answering Bilbo’s question or waiting for him to concede. Bilbo follows him, trying not to roll his eyes. Thorin has been taciturn and difficult ever since Thranduil and Bard declared the mountain under seige. The dwarves are in need of a leader, but their king has instead drawn away, hunting the treasure-room for the lost arkenstone or communing with his ghostly nephew. Bilbo expected more of Thorin, and is not ashamed to be angry at him for his stubbornness. But it sounds as if Thorin is asking for help now – and Bilbo will give it willingly, if it is in his power to give. 

They go down, down and further from the front hall than Bilbo has been since they arrived. The sun-vents fade and the lamps are dry and empty. The corridor grows thin and curves into a steady spiral, far too small for Smaug to have visited this place. At last the floor flattens out again and terminates at an unassuming door of solid stone, already open a crack and with its veil of dust disturbed. Thorin puts his shoulder against the door and it opens with a pitiful scream of complaint. 

Beyond is the most beautiful room that Bilbo has seen in the mountain so far.

It is not huge and grand like the throne room, nor decorated in fine, bejewelled mosaics like the bathhouses, nor hung with gold and silver like the treasury. It is a small room, cramped and strewn with shadows. And it is filled – every surface, every drawer, every shelf – with paper. Books, scrolls, stacks of parchment, framed maps, rotting wood slates, fragile quills, dried pots for inks and paints. Bilbo steps inside with a gasp. His face breaks into a broad smile as he turns back to Thorin.

"What a wonderful discovery! It looks untouched!"

"Smaug never dug it out," Thorin nods, carefully standing his torch inside a brazier well away from any piles of paper. "It is not our grandest library – the dragon befouled that – but it contains many older, more precious scraps. I've been studying them."

"I would love to look myself, if I'm allowed," Bilbo wanders among the podiums and bookshelves, running his fingers along sagging, leather spines and soft leaves. He glances over. "What are you reading?"

"Books of magic," Thorin says, following him at a sedate pace. 

Bilbo freezes and turns back to him. Thorin is peeling up the page of a huge book as wide as Bilbo's armspan. His expression is tense and haggard in the light of the single torch. Bilbo frowns. "Your people have a brand of magic, do they?"

"Not those of Erebor. It's never been to our taste," Thorin shakes his head. "But some dwarves from much older and darker eras wrote spells of their own, in our secret languages. The full songs are lost now. But if I can piece them together – hints from here and there—”

"What are you trying to do?" Bilbo asks. He wonders what could keep Thorin huddled among these dusty tomes for days. "Will this help you find the Arkenstone?"

Thorin raises his eyes a little. For a moment his expression clears, and his mouth twists. "I have been searching still, but... no, no..." and the shadows come back into his face. "This is far more important. There are stories here of golems – do you know what a golem is, Bilbo?"

"It's like a monster made of clay," Bilbo answers promptly.

"Maybe in children's nightmares," Thorin scoffs, and for a moment sounds like the proud, cantankerous friend Bilbo has come to treasure on this journey. He lets the paper in his hand fall back onto the book with a whisper like billowing sheets in the wind. “They were a favourite of the old dwarf magicians, and a homage to our creation by Mahal. The golem is said to be a servant, moulded and painted to appear as a perfect, beautiful dwarf, yet mindless and filled only with its master's will. Yet other stories say that the golem can think for itself – that it can hold a captured spirit such as the kind that tormented our ancestors in the great wars for Beleriand, but bound to the golem's creator and trapped in the clay."

It still sounds like fairytales to Bilbo's ears. He shrugs. "So what, you want to... make one as a weapon against your enemies? Thorin, really, you think this is a time to experiment with something like that?"

"No, Bilbo," Thorin meets his eye at last. "I want to make a golem for Kili."

After a very long moment, Bilbo shakes his head. "You what?"

Thorin takes a step towards him. "I need to bring Kili back to life. He was my kin, Bilbo, under my protection... yet he has been abandoned and neglected all these years. I can't stand what has happened to him, what is still happening to him – seventy years and I did nothing, I refused to believe, why didn't I _listen_?" for a moment he covers his face with his hand, his shoulders heaving. After a deep breath he looks up again. "If he only had a body, he would not be damned to this invisible un-life, cut off from his family, from the world. I can restore him to living flesh, Bilbo. Golems can be made of anything – clay, wood, blood – I think my blood, mixed with Fili's, could create a new body, perfectly matching Kili's spirit. Can you imagine it? Alive, again, alive!"

Bilbo swallows and feels a shudder run through him. Gandalf talked of magic like this, magic that needed blood, that drew in the dead – but the wizard did not mention it warmly. Gandalf was talking about evil, corruption, and foul things waiting in the shadows. But Thorin isn't evil and neither is Kili, so maybe, maybe... 

Bilbo asks, "Why tell me all this? I don't know anything about magic. We should tell Balin or Oin. Yes, let's go to them now, Thorin, let's talk to them about whether this is a good idea."

"No, I need you," Thorin takes another step closer. "I need your ring."

Bilbo splutters and his hand flies to his pocket. "M-my ring?"

"Yes!" Thorin holds out his hand. It is just a gesture of excitement, but to Bilbo it looks like a greedy demand and his fingers grip tight around the pocket where the ring sits waiting. "I can't explain it, Bilbo, but ever since I first wore it I can’t stop thinking about it – it reveals the dead, after all, so do you see where this leads? I think it is the key. I think the ring is what will animate the golem, make the new body truly alive – I need it, Bilbo!" and now he is very close, and he seems very tall all of a sudden.

"Well, no, let's think about this—” Bilbo steps back, and Thorin follows him.

"Your job is done, burglar," he frowns. "You have done admirably, and I will reward you. But you don't need to walk invisibly, or waste such a great gift on spying – give it to me. Give it to me, or you are condemning Kili to remain with the dead!"

"No," Bilbo snaps. "We need to talk about this with the others first."

"They will only get in my way," Thorin growls, and he leans in towards where Bilbo's hand clutching his prize. "How dare you deny me, halfling. Give it to me, give me the ring—”

"No!" Bilbo shouts, lunging away, and without even thinking about it he jams the ring on his finger and vanishes. Thorin gasps and then bellows in rage, but Bilbo is already darting around the shelves and running for the door. He slips through and finds himself in pitch darkness, but he remembers that only one corridor led upwards and that was the one that brought them here. With one hand on the wall he sprints, terrified that he will have forgotten an unexpected stair and will trip and brain himself. The corridor winds upwards beneath his feet, lifting him through the pitch blackness. Sometimes the wall opens into split passages leading away down into cold, strange shafts and Bilbo begins to fear more than just Thorin. Perhaps Smaug was not the only monster in this mountain. Perhaps there are other things, lying in wait in the roots of the mountain, things that slither silently over the stone, things with teeth and maws and mindless hungers...

At last, his legs aching and his throat burning in the cold air, the blackness rises to grey and he comes out into a familiar hall lit by the sun-vents. He takes only a moment to catch his breath before he goes on, terrified that Thorin is close on his heels. He must find Balin and Dwalin and tell them what Thorin is planning, tell them of the spark in Thorin's eyes that was not there before. His frantic search for the Arkenstone was bad enough – but this is worse, Bilbo is sure, much worse.

He jogs through the hall and along the lamplit corridor beyond, and then further on finds he's got turned around and is coming onto the unbarred walkways that surround the massive, cavernous throne room where King Thror once sat and was attended to. The dusty seat hangs in the distance like a boat far out on a lake. Bilbo makes his way around the edge of the cavern, staying away from the lip of the walkway. Soon he can hear voices and reckless laughter echoing around the austere palace. Bilbo sighs as he rounds a corner and sees Fili and Kili sitting on the edge of the walkway, swinging their legs out over the empty space. 

They sit with their backs to Bilbo. Fili has a bag of coins – probably priceless, or pricey enough to buy the whole Shire – and is hurling them out into the cavern, trying to land them on the facets of a huge statue of one of his ancestors carved into the far wall. Bilbo winces as Fili lets fly a particularly enthusiastic throw. He looks like he’s closing to flinging _himself_ off the cliff if he isn’t careful. Kili seems to have no such fears, breathless with laughter and slapping his knees as he leans out to see where the tiny glint of the coin landed.

“Right on top of his moustache!” he howls, throwing his head back in fresh guffaws.

“You try, you try,” Fili offers him the bag.

“No, no, I won’t get it two feet, I’m hopeless!”

“Give it a go, you lazy bag-of-bones,” Fili grins. Kili groans in complaint but he picks up a coin from the sack with his characteristic exaggerated movements that show whenever he has to interact with the physical world. His brow is furrowed in concentration, his bottom lip sucked in as he pulls his arm back, glancing between his fist and his target as if to make sure his hand still exists – perhaps to check that the coin hasn’t fallen right through it – and finally he sweeps forward and releases the coin with a grunt as if it took all the effort he had. The circle of gold arcs away across the deep cave, tinkling against the statue on the far side and tumbling away into the darkness. Fili whoops and shakes his brother’s shoulder, claps his hands, as Kili roars in triumph and punches the air. Mist is gathered along the walkway around them but it cannot dampen their voices.

Bilbo leans against the wall behind them, his heart beginning to slow down at last. How strange to think that no one else can see this, that if he took off the ring he would hear only one echoing, joyful voice. And if Fili knew he was here – if he knew anyone was here – he would no doubt fall silent out of habit, throw a curtain across this secret as quickly as he could.

Bilbo feels an ache of sympathy for Thorin, who is never able to see this sight even when he’s standing in the same room as his nephews. He has to beg and borrow the ring from Bilbo just to speak with Kili. It would be hard for anyone to feel obliged to another for so basic a right, but worse so for proud Thorin. Up here with the laughter echoing in his ears, Bilbo wonders if maybe Thorin’s idea is not so terrible… his heart is in the right place, at least. He just wants to make things right for the boy he feels he has failed for so long.

Mist trails around them and pulls back and moves forward like a tide and suddenly Bilbo realises that he has not seen _weather_ anywhere else in Erebor. His brow wrinkles and he straightens up. And then, beneath Kili’s hiccoughs of giggles, Bilbo hears the whispers.

They're so soft he can't make out the words at first, but it makes him straighten up and look around. The voices come from every direction, up and down and clustering loudest around Fili and Kili, where the mist is gathering thick. But it isn't mist at all. It's like the thinnest of worn, rotting laces hanging over a window. As Bilbo stares his eyes seemed to focus and he recognises the shapes of people. Glassy figures standing around the princes, some emerging right out of the floor or hovering in the empty air above the chasm. Bilbo feels as if he is choking in his terror. The figures are dwarves, or pieces of dwarves, some with gaseous clouds instead of faces or limbs, some stretched and thin like streams of syrup, some hideously peeling apart like a ball of paper hurled into a fire. The ghosts of Erebor, just as Kili said – they've been here all along, but Bilbo didn't notice until he believed in them.

 _"Are they our inheritance?"_ they croak in the softest of whispers, scores or hundreds of voices breathing in the words.

 _“Soon dead like all the rest,”_ comes the answer, an exhale.

 _“A true end, at last?”_ the mass inhales, or maybe they say _‘at least’._

Bilbo wants to reach out to his friends. Why can't Kili see them? They're so close to Kili, they're touching him and his brother, running their rotting fingers through his hair, stroking his hands, ugh! Bilbo would cry out, but he is afraid that the ghosts will notice him at last and attack him. Can they even hurt him? He doesn't want to find out. But _why can't Kili see them?_ He saw them before, when he first went into the mountain, and yet he has not spoken of them once since Smaug died. 

_"He's our fault. Both of them,"_ the ghosts whisper. Their voices shift in and out of hearing range, dropping to a soft buzz in the air like locusts in the distance.

It's because of Fili – Bilbo is suddenly, triumphantly sure of it. Kili is more _alive_ when Fili is around, they've both of them said so. The closer to life he gets, the further he is from the hideous plane on which the ghosts exist. 

_"...waited so long..."_ the ghosts surge and sway together. _"...our king came for us at last..."_

Bilbo tries to slow his breathing and unclench his hands. Perhaps he’s being foolish. Perhaps they’re harmless. Webs left behind after the spiders have long died, as Kili said.

 _"He's going to bring us back,"_ the ghosts are louder now, their unity growing.

Bilbo puts his hands over his mouth. Without the ring he cannot hear them... but suppose Thorin can? He is their king. What if they are so quiet that Thorin can't distinguish the whispers from his own thoughts? 

_"First our prince, our boy, our string to pull the king home. Then he's going to bring us all back."_

Bilbo turns and runs. 

The ghosts are everywhere now, smeared into the walls and resting in the crannies of the stones and statues; faces and scraps of cloth trailing in an undead breeze, faded fingers clenching above lintels and eyeballs shot through with black blood peering out of the walls as Bilbo passes. He runs faster and faster, wrenching the ring off his finger so hard he almost dislocates the joint, and they vanish like smoke in a high wind.

But they’re still there. He knows it now.

They’re _everywhere_.


	6. keep seaworthy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this chapter, I felt there were a few pieces missing that needed to be in place before the end and did some hurried rewriting. So it's ended up a very long chapter in consolation for being a late one.

Bofur finds Bilbo in the guardhouse above the front gate, sitting with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, turning the ring around and around between his fingers. It glints so prettily; even looking at it now, he can't believe that any bad can come from it. But then he thinks of the whispers and his stomach shrivels and his legs shake and he closes his hand over the ring as Bofur arrives so he doesn't have to look at it any more. 

"Bilbo!" Bofur says. "You missed dinner. I don't think you've skipped a meal once on this whole journey, even when it's been at its most rotten," he comes a little closer, his smile fading. "Are you feeling off-colour?"

"I suppose that's one way to put it," Bilbo replies, tucking the ring away in his pocket. He wraps his arms around his knees. His skin is very cold; he's been sitting here stewing for so long he hadn't noticed. "Would you close the door, Bofur?"

Bofur shuts it softly and comes to sit down beside him. "You need an ear?"

"Yes," Bilbo says. "Though I'm not even sure I can fill it."

"Is this something I shouldn't go repeating?" Bofur winces. "Because Bilbo, I swear as I love you, I'm awful bad at keeping secrets."

A small laugh bubbles up in Bilbo. "I know, Bofur," he grumbles. "But, well… somehow I doubt you'll be able to pass this one on. I don't think you're even going to understand it."

"All-right," Bofur sighs, propping his leg up on the bench and fetching his pipe from inside his coat. "But don't say I didn't warn you."

He strikes his flint and they share the pipe for a few breaths. The smoke sinks into Bilbo's blood and his racing heart begins to slow. He settles back against the wall. "I think I know how Kili came to be," he says. "Or at least, I think I see the shape of it, though I don't know what language could ever recall it," he lets out a long sigh through his nose. "There simply aren't words."

Bofur breathes a smoke ring out into the candlelight. "Have a go," he says. "I'm listening."

"I think maybe," Bilbo begins, pausing every couple of words. "Our lives are like little boats on a rough sea, in the darkness, with no land – not anywhere. And when you fall out of your boat or it overturns – that is to say, when we die – we're lost. You can never right it, never swim to safety. There _is_ no safety, because it is so dark that you can never find your boat again. We sink and we're gone. The sea swallows us up without knowing or caring that we were ever there. That's the way hobbits see these things, in our own way. It's not cruel, this world that holds our lives afloat for a time, it's simply so much bigger and more eternal than us."

Bofur inclines his head and 'hmms' and says, "That's one view, I suppose. I think the elves would disagree, but that's their business."

"Oh, they would," Bilbo nods. "And maybe Hobbits have got it wrong or maybe Elves are different and maybe I don't understand dwarves at all, but bear with me for now."

"I'll try."

Bilbo takes a breath and frowns. "But then suppose – suppose something so terrible happened, a storm – no – a cataclysmic maelstrom of sorts – so terrible that thousands of boats all went down together. A maelstrom, not from the natural sea, but alive and filled with something like magic – debris! Debris from the lost boats of all the creatures it had ever killed, and magic shed from the maelstrom's mind itself. And all those lives it captured all at once were packed so tightly together in the raging water that they didn't sink – they clung and they found the shattered pieces of each other's boat and the maelstrom itself kept them afloat, even as it tried to suck them down as quick as it could. And it was so horrid for them, Bofur, in the cold, roaring water, so frightening, and there were so _many_ that they couldn't help but want to hold tight to each other. So even as time went by and they had lost their own boats completely they didn't sink. They couldn't even think or see that there was no hope to find their lives again. So they held together because it seemed safest. And they've been there for all these years, treading water, holding hands, and they've found so much debris now that they've built an island of sorts, a barren and cruel island on which they're still battered and starving and frightened and drained by the water, but too scared to leave. And angry, too – angry at the maelstrom, angry at the sea, at their loss, all feeling and thinking together because they're so faded and weak without their boats. They want something, Bofur, but even they don't know what it is! They want to be alive again, and at the same time they want the fear and pain to stop, and it never does, not while Smaug was in the mountain, and not even now that he’s dead!"

Bilbo falls silent, staring at the hewn stone of the far wall. Beside him, Bofur shivers. "Is that really what it's like, here?" he asks. "That's what Erebor has become – a patchwork raft for the dead? And Smaug was a maelstrom, spinning them around forever?"

Bilbo nods. His mouth tastes of bile. He presses in close to Bofur. "They're everywhere. I've read stories of such places – dead marshes left by great battles, and black lands filled by ghosts. I wouldn't have believed it until I came here."

"But how does Kili fit in?" Bofur presses. "That lad isn't some miserable wraith, not the way you and Fili tell it."

"No," Bilbo agrees. "You see, despite getting weaker over the years and losing many of their fellows to the maelstrom, I think the ghost-raft learned new tricks to hold strong against Smaug. And I think... I'm not sure at all, Bofur, it's just the impression I get... I think they found that together, they could become a sort of lighthouse in the dark ocean. I reckon that's part of why it's so barren around the mountain. It's not just that Smaug burned the earth and drove everyone away. He hasn't come out for sixty years or so, isn't that right? But I think living things – the animals and birds, even the trees – are warned away by the dead lighthouse. They know the island of the ghosts is there, inside the mountain. So most of them stay away, or don't grow too big, hoping they won't be noticed."

"A lighthouse," murmurs Bofur.

"It's a tower on rocks above the sea," Bilbo explains. "To show ships the safe passage—"

"I know what a lighthouse is," Bofur chuckles, elbowing him. "You're not the only one who can read, Mr Baggins."

"My apologies," Bilbo smiles. He takes the proffered pipe and inhales another puff. "Anyway, I think the lighthouse wasn't actually to warn life away. It was their beacon to draw life in. Not just anyone – they were seeking help. They wanted to be rescued. So they swung their light out into the ocean, one tiny beam for all those hundreds of miles in every direction, and they looked for their saviour. Their king. They were looking for Thror, I suppose, but maybe by the time they found where he'd gone he was dead himself – sunk. And maybe they found Thrain, or maybe they didn't. But at last the light came upon Thorin and his family. But Thorin’s boat was still strong and sea-worthy, and the light was so small and faint that nobody could see it way out there in the empty ocean. But it saw _them_ , yes, definitely. And at long last it saw something it did not intend – a little child falling in the water, dead of fever, who would have been lost in moments.”

Bilbo shakes his head, curls falling in his eyes. “It’s so hard explain what happened Bofur, because I can’t be sure myself. But what I imagine is that the raft managed a burst of light for an instant, the right instant! Or perhaps it was like a tendril of willpower from a thousand ancient ghosts. They must have had an instinctive desire to preserve their king’s line. And in that instant the child was lit by the beacon and by its light he found his brother, who was also dying, struggling to keep his own boat upright in the tossing waves. And the child reached out and grabbed a hold of his brother's prow, and held on, and perhaps his brother – not even understanding what was happening, I expect, in his fever and confusion – pulled him into the boat and held him tight and together they kept themselves afloat. And so Fili was not capsized, and he lived, and they've been like that ever since – two spirits sharing a single body, a single life. Growing up together with a single face and voice."

Bofur has let the pipe go out. He stares at Bilbo with his mouth half open. Bilbo turns to him, his hands clawing at his own hair. "But don't you see now, Bofur? We've all come upon the raft, now! We've all moored our boats to its broken shore. I think Kili might even have left Fili's boat and is walking across it in the dark, not even aware of it – it could have happened when Fili went down the river in the barrels and Kili arrived at Erebor ahead of him. He's pulled Fili's boat right up onto the raft and stranded them both here. The dead are gathered tightest around them, drawn to them. The ghosts know that those lads are only afloat because of what the Dead Raft did. But they don't want Kili anyway, he was a bitter accident – they want a living king, they want Thorin – they want Thorin to rescue them, to bring them back to life, to avenge their deaths maybe – they want _everything!_ And it's all driving Thorin _mad_!" Bilbo seized Bofur's arm. "No one can live here. Erebor is a tomb, Bofur, and we cannot stay here with the ghosts, not for all the gold in the world!"

Bofur grips the pipe between his teeth and takes the hobbit's hands between both of his own. "Now Bilbo, get a hold of yourself. Even if some of what you're saying is true, that doesn't mean the mountain is a lost cause. You'd never have felt at home in Erebor. You don't like all these tunnels with no green or stars. That's what's got you uneasy – the rest of us don't feel like this, do we?"

"No," Bilbo admits. "You don't seem to."

"Because this place is perfect for us, Bilbo. It’s not your warm hobbit-hole and that makes everything feel wrong to you. It’s a hobbit’s fears coming to the surface.”

“But the ghosts, Bofur, you do believe me—”

“I do, I do. But no matter how many of our kin died here, that doesn’t give them the right to keep it to themselves," Bofur slings his arm around Bilbo's shoulders. "It was a terrible thing, and if there really are spirits trapped here, that's terrible too. But we'll find a way to sort that out later – right now, it's the living we've got to worry about, yes? The armies on our doorstep are far worse than the ones only you can see. We need to keep ourselves alive. Think about that."

"Yes," Bilbo nods, relaxing against Bofur's side. "Yes, I'm tying myself in knots over something I don't even understand."

"We'll figure it out in time. Perhaps Gandalf will come back and help," Bofur promises. He glances around. "And until then, I reckon I'll just have to grit my teeth and whistle every time I have to take a piss in an empty corner, knowing all those ghosts could be having a gander at my unmentionables."

Bilbo gives a huff of laughter. "I've been like that ever since I found out Kili is walking around."

"You're a hypocrite, you little blighter," Bofur rubs his arm. "Even when you're not wearing that ring I can't hear you coming until you pop up and frighten the wits out of me. Durin's beard, you're freezing, Bilbo!" he brushes the back of his hand against Bilbo's neck. "Let's go back to the fire and see if those greedy cretins have left any food for you."

\---

But Bilbo can’t forget those fingers above the lintel of the door, those shivering fingers, as if they had misplaced their mind and were too afraid to go look for it. Erebor needs help that it cannot get from inside the mountain. It needs someone like Elrond, like Gandalf. Even Beorn might understand these phenomena, or at least recognise whether they are a true danger or not.

Bilbo is lost. After everything he told Bofur, he cannot bring himself to repeat his fears again to the dwarves. They sound so foolish when spoken aloud. ‘A hobbit’s fears,’ Bofur called it! But Bofur didn’t see the ghosts knotting their fingers in Kili’s hair, invisible, pawing at their lost princes…

He has to end the siege. Once the living pour into Erebor, once its halls are full of light and laughter again, then a solution will present itself. Bilbo is sure of it. But he and Thorin have avoided each other’s company since their altercation in the ancient library. Bilbo wants more than anything to speak freely with him, beg him to consult with Kili about the ghosts of Erebor, and to listen with a clear mind for strange choruses in his ear. But Thorin will not speak to him. He speaks to no one, except in empty rooms to his dead nephew. And he is doing it more frequently than ever now that Bilbo will not lend him the ring. 

Bilbo knows what he has to do.

He takes the Arkenstone over the wall, and hopes against hope that it will be bait enough for the hook.

\---

Thorin walks with his chest puffed out and his arms swinging. Ori, who was watchman on the wall, has just run in and told them that the host wishes to parlay and Thorin has agreed to let a small force approach Erebor. He thinks the elf-king has learned of Dain’s approach and will come pleading on his knees. Bilbo knows better.

He jogs and hops after Thorin in the front hall, and catches his elbow. Thorin twitches and looks down at him with more surprise than animosity. Bilbo seizes his good mood.

“I know you don’t want to listen to me right now,” he says, “but Kili can verify what I’m about to tell you. Talk to him.”

“I talk to him every day,” Thorin says, brows tightening.

“But you don’t hear him!” Bilbo tightens his grip on the king’s arm. “You must speak to him and Fili _together_ so that he can _answer you_ , Thorin!”

Thorin’s lip twithes in a snarl, “Are you giving me orders, Halfling—”

“It’s not Kili that’s answering you, Thorin,” Bilbo gasps over him. “When you sit in the treasure-room by yourself talking to him, it’s _not him speaking back_. Maybe sometimes it’s your own thoughts and sometimes… sometimes I don’t know… but what I fear is that it is your people’s voices you can hear. Your dead people,” Thorin is staring at him with his lips slightly parted now. His frown is so deep his eyebrows are almost touching. “Your dwarves who died when Smaug attacked Erebor,” Bilbo whispers, glancing around, wishing he could slip on the ring for just a moment to see how many ears surround them. “They’re still here in the mountin. They’ve come to you, as their king, seeking your help. Don’t listen to them over your living friends, Thorin,” Bilbo shakes his head. “Please.”

Thorin jerks his arm out of Bilbo’s hold. He huffs at the hobbit. “You are losing touch with the waking world, Bilbo,” he says, not unkindly, and strides away. And maybe he’s right.

Only a few hours later he casts Bilbo out of his mountain, and Bilbo wonders what thoughts are going through his head as he watches the hobbit leave with his enemies – and who put them there. 

\---

The night after Thorin banished him from Erebor's halls, Bilbo sits smoking on a dry riverbed by a shrunken tributary to the main river. He is alone, with two blankets wrapped around his shoulders. Winter is in the stones and the biting wind, but Gandalf is the only one he feels up to speaking with right now, and Gandalf is busy.

Over the mumbling water he can barely hear the noises of the camp, the clink of weapons pulled out for cleaning and the occasional holler between the Lake-Men. Most of the host is asleep already, or just bedding themselves down in their uncomfortable tents. Bilbo has been given a corner somewhere, with a rough mattress on the stones and a grass-filled pillow. He should not be ungrateful. He has not helped anybody, much.

He sucks on his pipe. An insect nips his neck and he brushes it away. It returns quickly, biting harder now. Bilbo claps his hand to his neck and feels his ear pinched. With a squeak he twists in surprise. He’s alone on the flat riverbed.

No – not alone. He rolls his eyes. “Kili!”

He cannot hear laughter, but he’s sure it’s in the air. Bilbo fumbles for his ring without letting go of his pipe and manages to hook it onto his finger. His vision swims and the young dwarf appears, sitting beside him with one leg propped up on the stone that serves as Bilbo’s seat.

“Thought you were free at last, did you?” Kili winks, and Bilbo feels his stomach clench.

“Oh, Kili,” he sighs, and bites down on his pipe so he has both hands free to pull the ghost into his arms. Kili is surprisingly solid today, a cool weight in Bilbo’s embrace like somebody arriving in a warm room after a walk in the snow.

“How is Thorin?” he asks as he pulls away. “How are they all?”

Kili shrugs. “Less mirthful for your absence.”

Bilbo ducks his head, swallowing the lump in his throat. He looks up and tries to smile. “I would ask whether he barred you from leaving the mountain, but I suppose it’s the easiest thing in the world for Fili to cover for you. ‘Oh, no, Thorin, he’s right here, aren’t you, brother?’” he puts on a terrible, too-gruff mockery of Fili’s voice.

Kili laughs and looks at his hand as if to cover his expression. It occurs to Bilbo – and he hates himself for not thinking of it before now – that if his banishment is upheld and he returns to the Shire with the ring, without speaking to Thorin, then Thorin in turn will never hear Kili’s voice again. Never. He might as well be dead a second time.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out.

Kili shakes his head. “I knew for days that you had the stone.”

Bilbo makes a quiet, pained noise of acknowlegement. Kili rests his chin in his hands. “I should have stopped you. I knew it wouldn’t work. But I _wanted_ it to work. He seemed so… not himself ever since he started talking to me. But these days he always looks to you to see clearly when he can’t. I thought that when he understood how far you were willing to go to wake him up, he’d see how foolish he was being. I suppose… I suppose madness doesn’t work like that.”

Bilbo, too, wishes Kili had stopped him and feels a jolt of bitterness that Kili did not even try to warn him about how badly Thorin would react. But Bilbo should have known better, too. Now he is out here in a well-made camp with a steady supply of food and the kind words of an elf king, and better yet, in a place away from those hideous ghosts. But he would rather be beside his friends. He would rather not feel this shame that he tells himself he doesn’t deserve, and yet continues to funnel into his heart. He would rather be on speaking terms with Thorin. 

Kili says without warning, “Bofur reckoned you’ve been seeing ghosts. I thought they’d gone into hiding – I just catch them out the corner of my eye, every now and then. Fili doesn’t notice them at all.”

“What else did Bofur tell you?” Bilbo croaks.

“A poor rendition of your story, I suspect,” Kili winces. “But I think I see where it’s coming from.”

“And?” Bilbo pushes.

Kili tucks his legs up and rests his folded arms on them. His nose wrinkles. “I think you’re right. About me. I always hoped I was stuck here in life for a purpose, but that’s foolish. We’re all accidents. ”

“Maybe you’re here to help Thorin,” Bilbo says hopefully. “Maybe he’ll listen to you and Fili.”

“Maybe. But this mountain…” Kili shakes his head, looking up at the black silhouette of Erebor against the moon-brightened clouds. “It’s sick, Bilbo. And its mind is as twisted as Thorin’s is becoming. I don’t know how to help either of them.”

He stands up suddenly, rubbing his arms as if he can feel the cold. He begins to pace across the stones. “I wish I knew how to make the ghosts pass on, to make them sink back down to where the dead should go. But if I knew that, I’d have done it myself, long ago!” he snarls.

“Kili!” Bilbo gasps. “Don’t say that. Fili would miss you.”

“Would he?” Kili turns back to Bilbo suddenly, and a few stones around him lift as if in a hurricane and then clatter away like hail. His face is full of shadows from the moon above them and his brow is heavy. “He’s walked a knife’s edge his whole life because of me. He may never be accepted as a king to our people with all the rumours about him.”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t even be here if not for you,” Bilbo insists. “You’ve saved his life once, maybe twice now.”

“We can’t know what would have happened if I had just died as I was supposed to,” Kili growls. “And now my presence is driving Thorin’s madness on, with this stupid idea about the golem.”

“You know about that?” Bilbo asks. Perhaps Thorin has not discarded his advice as quickly as he discarded the advisor—

“He told me before he told you, Bilbo. He tells me everything, and I can’t even answer him, because he doesn’t say such things when Fili is there to relay my words,” Kili shakes his head and digs his fingers into his hair. “I’m frightened of what’s coming, Bilbo. Either a long siege, or a fierce battle – either way, I’m frightened of what will become of my family,” he begins to pace again, towards the river and then back to where Bilbo is puffing on his pipe to keep it from going out. “This business about the island of the dead that Bofur talked about – what do you think will happen if Thorin or Fili die close to Erebor? Close to the raft?”

Bilbo swallows. After a moment he says quietly. “I think they’ll become ghosts like you.”

“I think so too!” Kili cries. There’s such terror and pain in his voice that Bilbo aches to assure him that they could be wrong, but that is not a hope they can cling to. Kili throws his arm out towards the mountain. “Then the ghosts will have their king at last! What will that mean? What will the island become, with Thorin fresh and strong at its helm?”

Bilbo imagines the battle that is coming – dwarves, elves, men – and the hundreds or even thousands who might die for the gold lust of their leaders. What if they become ghosts too? What if the dead raft spreads out and out from Erebor, driving life ahead of it like animals before a wildfire? What if the desperate ghosts fall under the dominion of greater, cleverer evils like the one Radagast saw in Dol Guldur?

“I don’t know what we can do,” Bilbo says, his eyes following the restless ghost as Kili folds his arms and kicks a stone into the river. 

“I’ll protect them,” Kili turns sharply to face him. “I’ll protect Thorin as best I can, if it comes to a fight. He must stay alive. The dead mustn’t get him!”

“I thought you couldn’t fight living things,” Bilbo points out.

“I’m growing stronger,” Kili chews on the inside of his cheek, and Bilbo agrees that he has seemed more physically present than ever these last few days. “Maybe I have a purpose after all,” he shivers. “And I’ll keep the Erebor ghosts away from Thorin, if I can. Perhaps that will help him clear his head.”

Bilbo bites the stem of his pipe until his teeth hurt. The wind rushes down the valley and shivers through Bilbo’s curls, but touches Kili not at all. Bilbo cannot keep it in any longer and says in a rush, “But Kili, you haven’t said – do you _want_ him to make you the golem, if it’s really possible? Do you want to come back to life?”

Kili’s nostrils flare and he looks sharply at Bilbo. After a moment he kicks his heels at the rocks, turning his head towards the low creek that is nothing but a dark show before them. He mutters, “I am already alive, when I’m with my brother.”

“But you could have a body,” Bilbo presses. “Never be invisible again.”

“It won’t even work. No one knows how to make golems anymore,” Kili shakes his head. “They’re just stories for babies.”

“But do you _want_ it to work?” Bilbo lowers his pipe. “Suppose when this is all over, and Thorin’s himself again, and we have all the time we need?”

Kili’s bright grin twitches and spreads across his face. It’s the warmest and most lively expression Bilbo has seen on any creature. In the corners of his eyes little lights like glow-worms are welling up and falling away as if he’s shedding pieces of himself. He nods at Bilbo.

Bilbo takes a breath, “Then we should try,” he says. “I’ll give Thorin the ring, when all this is over,” in the back of his mind a voice is screaming, _no, it’s yours, you found it, it’s yours!_ but he pushes it down and points his pipe back towards the camp, “and perhaps Gandalf will be convinced to help too if he can ever forgive your uncle. We’ll try it and see, shall we?”

Kili nods again and scrubs his face with his arm. His chest rises and falls and he purses his lips as if letting out a long breath; and that absence tugs at the veins feeding Bilbo’s heart. Kili whispers, “None of it matters if I cannot find a way to help Thorin.”

He raises his head. “I should go back,” he says in a clear voice. “I’m glad you’re well here, Bilbo. Thank you for everything you’ve done for us.”

“I’m sure I’ll see you again,” Bilbo gives him a shaky smile. “Even if no one else does.” 

Kili laughs, and then he looks back towards the mountain and is gone in an instant, as if he had never been there at all. Bilbo rubs his eyes and wonders, not for the first time, if he is the victim of some contagious dream.


	7. after the battle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading everyone, and for all the supportive comments! The moment I saw the original prompt eight months ago I knew this was how it was going to end, so do forgive me. It's been a very long time coming.

Bilbo awakes to the sound of his own name being called from far away, through a thick cloud of mist. For a wonderful moment, He thinks he’s back in Bag End. He can see it in his mind, his soft bed, the sunlight filtering through the window and the green smell of wood and earth after the rain, and he’s rather angry at the voices of the dwarves who have woken him up.

“Bilbo!” a hand brushes his shoulder, but the touch is as distant as the stars.

Now he feels like he is spinning very fast, with no sense of where the ground might be. He wonders if he's back in the river with the barrels. But that was a while ago, he knows.

“Come on, old fellow, you can’t be dead!”

He wonders why his head hurts. There’s something digging into his back and his arm feels pulled at the shoulder and numb when he tries to move it. Soon the earthy aromas are gone, and like a sharp slap to his cheek comes the scent of blood and mud and worse things, the terrible leavings of bodies that have no minds to command them any longer. He gags and opens his eyes. One of them is sticky and cracks open with some difficulty. A wave of pain sloshes through his head.

“He’s up!” Bilbo hears a clap. It’s Fili’s voice. “Fantastic survivor, our Bilbo, didn’t I say?”

He raises his reeling head and tries to sit up. He can blurrily make out two shapes kneeling beside him, reaching in to steady him with gentle hands. He blinks and their faces come into focus. Fili is beaming at him, his cheeks flushed with blood and his unbound hair shifting in the wind. He is wearing the armour that Bilbo saw him choose from Erebor’s treasury a few days ago, fine steel filigreed with gold that seems to glow in the last gasp of sunlight as the afternoon dies. Kili is in different colours, a dark-burnished breastplate with blue gems set into the Erebor crest. It matches Fili’s almost exactly in design. Kili is not smiling. His head is bowed and his mouth is a grim line. 

Bilbo realises he can no longer hear the clash of battle. The mist seems to be growing thicker around them by the minute. He swings his head around and immediately regrets it, grunting and pressing his hand to his brow. He pushes off his helm and the headache eases a bit.

“Can you see me?” Fili asks with a laugh, waving his hand in front of Bilbo’s face.

“Ow – yes, stop that,” Bilbo flinches at the sudden movement. He sucks in a breath and tastes the gore in the air. “D-did we win?”

“Yes,” Fili grins. “Yes, it is over.”

Bilbo looks at Kili’s cold eyes and knows that some terrible price has been paid. “And the others?”

Kili ducks his head, one hand digging at the collar of his breastplate. His voice is hoarse when he replies. “I couldn’t – I couldn’t save him, Bilbo. The spear went right through me like I was nothing,” he squeezes his eyes shut. “All this, and I might as well not have been there.”

Fili glances at his brother. He turns back to Bilbo. “Thorin is gravely wounded. He wants to speak with you. I think,” he licks his bottom lip. “I think you should come quickly, if you can.”

Bilbo tries to push himself to his feet. The mud slips beneath his hand and his arm gives way. The world whirls around him for a moment. He can’t stand yet, though he doesn’t want to admit it. But suddenly comes a new voice through the mist, unfamiliar and with the loping accent of the Lake-Men.

“Mr Baggins!” the voice calls. “Mr Baggins, can you hear us?”

“Gandalf must’ve have sent a whole pack after you,” Fili looks up. “We have to go. Stay here and they’ll find you.”

“That sounds quite agreeable,” Bilbo says with some relief. He manages to prop himself up on one elbow.

“Goodbye, Bilbo,” Kili says softly. Fili is already on his feet, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Come on, brother!” he holds out his hands to pull Kili to his feet. “Aren’t you ready?”

“I’m ready,” Kili mumbles.

Fili grabs his brother’s face with his bare hands. “Don’t look like that!” he kisses Kili’s forehead. “There’s nothing to fear, I know it, and you will see soon enough. It’s been too long for you – no longer! I won’t allow it! Yes?”

Finally a smile tugs at the corners of Kili’s mouth. “Yes,” he says.

“Take care, Bilbo!” Fili calls, slinging his arm around Kili’s shoulder and pulling him away. He’s dressed in a red-brown tunic of linen, and Kili in blue cloth cinched at the waist. Bilbo is massaging the bridge of his nose and does not notice the difference. He grunts a reply to them and sees them meander away in the corner of his eye. The last thing he hears is some word passed between them, and Kili’s laughter.

\---

“Mr Baggins!”

“Here,” Bilbo croaks. “I’m here!”

The man strides out of the mist, tall as a mountain it seems, and indeed the clouds are parting behind him and the fog is burning off as quick as anything. The Lonely Mountain stands above them all like a grand gravestone. Bilbo swallows. His head is clearing. Thorin wounded – more than wounded, by the sound of it.

“Mr Baggins?”

“Here!” Bilbo calls again, raising his hand. There is a glint of light and he realises the ring is still on his finger. Of course the poor man can’t find him. He says, “A moment, a moment,” and manages to slump far enough forward to take the weight off his arm. He wrenches the ring off with some difficulty. It feels cold in the palm of his hand, and he tucks it into his pocket. The man gives a yell of surprise.

“Where did you come from? I swear I’ve walked right past here twice!”

“I am very small,” Bilbo touches his hand to the side of his head and feels the blood-matted hair and the aching bruise there. “Would you help me up, please? In fact, would you mind being my legs for a little while—”

\---

Thorin’s tent is dark and smells of meat opened to the elements. Bilbo is shuffled forward like a bucket passed hand-to-exhausted-hand towards a house already lost to the fire. Thorin lies in a rough bed laid with moth-eaten, Erebor blankets, the fading cloth inlaid with gold thread and tireless embroidery. It is almost grotesque that they’ve been selected over warm, woollen coverlets from Laketown or worse still, the faultless weaves from the elves. Would they rather Thorin die beneath rotting dwarven crafts than live because he touched proper bedclothes? But perhaps that’s not the choice they made. Perhaps they knew dignity was all they could hope to save.

“Bilbo,” Thorin whispers as the candlelight is brought down to Bilbo’s level. The smile on the old dwarf’s face is faint but real. Bilbo realises how long it is since he has seen it.

They talk for some time, the way they did before Thorin first entered the mountain. The other dwarves in the tent retreat back outside or into the corners, all except for Dwalin who crouches on the far side of the bed with his head bandaged and his cheeks bloodless. The knots that Bilbo thought had tangled him and Thorin completely beyond hope of escaping begin to open and fall away. Part of him doesn’t want them to, because the reason for this sudden peace between them is too cruel. He cannot believe this is it, this is their last conversation, after so many he did not appreciate until now. He cannot help teasing Thorin, and Thorin laughs even though the pain spasms on his face. For a moment Bilbo is sure that this is all just a sulk Thorin has got himself into yet again. The dwarf is still lucid, merely pacified from the raging king who stood upon the wall, more clear-spoken now than the wild uncle who challenged the hobbit in the underground library. He even lifts his hand to put it over Bilbo’s. Surely he will pull through. He must have the strength left. 

But his skin is awfully cold. Bilbo rests his free hand over Thorin’s in the hope of warming him through.

“Did you,” Thorin takes in a slow, shivering breath, “did you see the lads? My Fili… Are they here now?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Bilbo looks around. “But yes, I saw them outside, on the field.”

“Will you look?” Thorin rasps. “For me? If they’re here I wish to speak to them one last time—”

His sight must be fading; or his wits, and terror suddenly floods Bilbo’s veins. He cannot go now, holding Bilbo’s hand, he cannot go if he has not said all his goodbyes. Bilbo stammers, “They aren’t here, Thorin, but I’ll send someone—hold on, please, I’ll send someone to find Fili—”

Thorin shakes his head, gaze shifting towards the ceiling of the tent. “I won’t ask you to lend the ring again. I won’t ask that. You were right.”

“But they wouldn’t need the ring if they could find Fili—”

And it all

comes

together

He remembers the armour that became soft, clean tunics, and why didn’t he see? And he had the ring on, but Fili was looking right at him, and why didn’t he see? And Kili’s face – and Kili’s words – _I couldn’t save him, the spear went right through me_ , and why didn’t he _see_?

Thorin will not ask him to lend the ring, but he wants it still, wants it without lust or senseless ambition to raise the dead. He only wants to say goodbye. Bilbo would give it to him, but he knows it will do no good. 

“Thorin,” he croaks, and lifts his hand from Thorin’s cold knuckles to shove the tears away. He has no time for them. “I think I saw them go. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but I know now. They went together. They were glad, Thorin. They weren’t afraid. They went together into the mist and they will not come back now.”

Thorin’s breath catches in his throat and he struggles silently for a moment beneath the blanket. His eyes roll in his head and then focus on Bilbo. "Then I am glad to follow," he whispers. 

Bilbo's shoulders are shaking. “You can’t go,” he croaks. “You mustn’t, Thorin, you must stay alive. Don’t become another ghost.”

“I won’t,” Thorin whispers, the smile tugs at his mouth again. “I have to catch up with the lads.”

Bilbo breathes until the sobs pass and then nods. Thorin's hand tightens almost imperceptibly over his. "You have been a good friend to us, Bilbo."

And then the his grip slackens, and he says something, calling Bilbo a child of the kindly west, and Bilbo nods and accepts the whispered apology though he’s not even sure Thorin knows what he’s saying now, and he promises the king, “Of course you are forgiven. Of course, of course, it’s done.”

Thorin smiles, and says, “The pain’s going. Will you… fetch Dwalin?”

Dwalin is already there. Thorin does not seem to see him until he moves around the bed and stands in Bilbo’s place. Bilbo gives Thorin’s cold hand into Dwalin’s warm fingers. He goes outside. The stench of the battlefield is thick in the air, like smoke filling a blocked-up room. Bilbo finds a bare rock and sits.

A group of men call to him as they pass, carrying the wounded on stretchers and donkeys. They want aid finding those who still live. Bilbo knows he should help, he should, but he is one small hobbit and all he wants is to be left alone. When the Lake-Men have gone he puts on the ring in the hope that no one else will find him. He sits weeping, looking up at the mountain. It stands as it has from the beginning. It is blind, faceless and featureless to Bilbo’s eyes but for a few runnels of snow. 

Except that it is not unchanged. There is colour rising from the peaks like a heat-haze. Reds and purples like the setting sun, and flickers of green and white-blue like stars and the flowing curtains of light that sometimes fill the sky to the north in winter. The colours grow brighter until they are pouring upwards like a bonfire raging out of control, obscuring the whole crown of the mountain. They funnel into a rope whose end vanishes among the thin clouds. The silence of the fire seems wrong, as if Bilbo’s ears are blocked up by water. This sight should not be silent, it should be singing, it should be roaring, it should be pouring a terrifying heat and sound upon him like the wildfire in the trees below the Misty Mountains. 

Bilbo’s mouth hangs open; the tears are still pouring down his cheeks, but he does not raise his hand to wipe them away. His heart is racing. His hands shake in his lap. And across all that space between him and the peaks of the mountain, he finally hears a whisper made of a thousand voices as thin as spider-threads.

He knows an instant what has happened.

Thorin has died. Smaug is dead, the mountain won, the dead avenged. And their king has died. The ghosts of Erebor who have waited so long for an ending are following the last of Thror’s line out of life. 

The colours fade, sparking and trembling as they exhaust themselves. Bilbo forces his eyes to stay open even when they sting and blur with tears, watching until very the last of the fire has faded and the mountain stands lonely once more, emptied, hollowed, cleansed. 

Anew.

\---

Bilbo and Bofur go through the treasure the morning of the king’s burial. There are relics of every shape and form here; chests carved in deep relief showing heroic battles, trees of jewellery as delicate as lace or with beads of gold and silver as large as bilbo’s fingers, fine instruments for every purpose from calculating the weight a bridge can bear to predicting the trails of the stars. Bofur helps Bilbo find rank upon rank of armour, some standing proudly on mannequins and others piled six deep against each other. Bilbo goes through them as carefully as they have time for and chooses a breastplate of dark steel, with a crest of inlaid blue lacquer. 

“It isn’t quite the same,” Bilbo says, as Bofur holds it up to the light of the torches. “Kili’s had gems. But I didn’t expect to find a physical match here in the treasury. He was all his own creature, not a mere reflection of life.”

“Are we counting this against my share of the hoard, or yours?” Bofur raises an eyebrow.

“Mine, obviously!” Bilbo scolds. “Dain has offered me far more than I deserve after that business with the Arkenstone, and I’ve always said I don’t need a fourteenth—”

“I know, I know, I’m pulling your beard,” Bofur laughs. “You’re too easy, Bilbo.”

The empty breastplate is buried at Thorin’s left hand; Fili lies on his right. Bilbo had said that Kili’s armour should have been beside his brother’s body, but the dwarves like their symmetry and Bilbo doesn’t argue with them. It is their grave to live with, after all, theirs to visit and tend and remember. 

The dead are dead to a hobbit’s eyes. They do not live on once the mourning is over. Not anymore.


End file.
